Eric Flannery is a Navy veteran and co-owner of the Big Board, a restaurant and bar in Washington, D.C., on H Street. The Big Board had thrived for a decade. But Flannery says that when D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser passed emergency mandates that required his staff to check personal medical records and employees to remain masked at all times, he did some soul-searching and refused to comply. “We’re not agents of the government, and my servers are not second-class citizens that need to be masked,” he said at a Heritage Foundation event.
The fallout was devastating. The restaurant was closed, and its license remains suspended. While Flannery is hopeful the Big Board will one day reopen, he doesn’t regret resisting what he called the “immoral” mandates. “We aren’t going to participate in any state-sponsored discrimination of any kind,” he said.
Martin Avila ran an event company. He did well, serving a city that was the epicenter for hundreds of conferences each year. But when Bowser restricted conference-style events, Avila had no choice but to shut down entirely. While Avila did shift his company online and has been able to rehire employees, he said that the city is now investigating him for “scamming” customers as a result of his complying with Bowser’s mandate.
Noe Landini, the owner of multiple businesses in Virginia and Washington, D.C., faced the same mandates. His restaurant, Junction Capitol Hill, had only been open a month when Bowser instituted the first round of mandates. While Landini complied at first, he later began to send the message that all were welcome at his restaurant and there would be no discrimination based on race, sex, or vaccine status.
As time went on, Landini began to see that the restaurant industry was especially targeted. “It’s hard to ignore the fact that you can go into grocery stores or home improvement stores or other businesses that thrived during COVID and wonder why is it that I am not allowed to run my business in the same way that these other companies are allowed to run their business?”
Landini described how hard it was to require young, newly trained employees to confront new customers who may have had a good reason not to be vaccinated or just forgot their vaccine card and tell them that they now must leave. “On paper, it looks simple, but it’s not simple. You’re inserting yourself into confrontations on a daily basis.”
While much of America has rightly moved on from the pandemic, it’s vital that we remember what these mandates did to so many businesses.
Nicole Russell ( @russell_nm ) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a Fort Worth Star-Telegram opinion writer and previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
