Many of our colleagues are also currently pushing for more transparency for state government and this is the best first step to make sure the state of Michigan is openly communicating what the rules are for one of our largest industries.
I urge a “yes” vote for Senate Bill No. 250 to help Michigan restaurants and event centers.
Senator Horn’s statement is as follows:
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle wanted us to participate in the conversation over the rules defining how we were going to manage this COVID crisis. This bill does exactly that. We’ve had others and they’ve been vetoed and they’ve been argued down, but this is a conversation that certainly needs to be started. Now, what I’d like to hear is the other side talking about the good parts of this bill, not just the parts they don’t like. That’s collaboration. What I’d like to hear is from the Governor’s office the parts that she likes and the parts that she doesn’t like and to respond to the idea that there are no metrics for closing, for reopening, for staying reopened. Our restaurants and our businesses need certainty. And what we talked about in the Economic and Small Business Development Committee that recommended this bill to the floor was that it’s not just the restaurants that are dealing with COVID and the limited capacities and the shutdowns at any given notice.
I read this morning in one of our Capitol press reports that we’re seeing some kind of a surge in cases again. And this causes restaurants to say, “Are we going to close down again?” We recall that two days before St. Patrick’s Day last year, that we had restaurants and bars with inventory from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, waiting for—some of them—their biggest day of the year, and they were shut down. No metrics were defined. There was no presentable data to say that this had to happen. We were all a little nervous at the time so we went along with that. Twenty-eight days went by. We lost Easter—the restaurants—we lost Mother’s Day. We opened up for limited capacity. We had a case at Harper’s in East Lansing that made me ask the question, if we had 24 cases of food poisoning rather than 24 cases of COVID, how would the health department have handled it? And why couldn’t we handle it in the same way and deal with that situation, clean it up, talk about it, shut them down, take away their license, do whatever it takes to set a precedent, and demonstrate that we’re serious about this. But instead there was a scorched earth policy based on no science, no data, and no metrics, that closed down indoor dining around the state, including the Upper Peninsula which at the time had two hospitalizations due to COVID—two, in the entire U.P. Their restaurants, and bars, and indoor dining were shut down because of Harper’s.
And then with the same executive order, casinos were opened up. The uncertainty with restaurants—then we allowed limited indoor dining again just a couple of days before Thanksgiving, by golly, we got closed again and we lost the biggest day of the year for some of our restaurants. In my hometown, two of the largest restaurants in the country were shut down and they lost Thanksgiving, they lost Christmas, they lost New Year’s celebrations.
On February 4 we found out kind of under the radar screen that they were extended out to March 29 after they were opened to 25 percent. And then they were opened to 50 percent. From one week to the next we don’t know what that means. We don’t understand the metrics. We’re not getting the data. We’re not getting the science. We’re just getting lip service. And when I asked the administration what prevents us from closing down again—we don’t know, we don’t now what those metrics are. And, Mr. President, I don’t want my restaurants to have to restock their dumpsters for the fourth time in a year because they don’t understand what the Governor’s doing. And for that, I ask for support of this bill.
The following bill was read a third time:
House Bill No. 4126, entitled
A bill to amend 1994 PA 451, entitled “Natural resources and environmental protection act,” by amending section 43525c (MCL 324.43525c), as added by 2020 PA 262.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: