PORTLAND, Ore. — Restaurants and bars that were forced to shut down during last week's batch of winter storms are asking Oregon lawmakers to help them recover.
Business owners within the restaurant industry said they believe it's time for city and state leaders to acknowledge that extreme weather events are not rare. Some of their asks include working with utility companies to reduce outages and creating a relief fund to assist restaurants with fewer than 100 employees. Right now, they estimate 60% of western Oregon restaurants are in danger of failing.
"We’re still coming off a lot of challenges from the pandemic," said Jessica Silverman, a partner at the restaurant Grassa. "I can say that for this restaurant specifically, we’re still not doing the level of business that we were doing pre-pandemic in 2019, and despite the fact we have lower revenue, we have rising costs. We have a lot of things working against us."
Restaurants and bars across the state presented five ways the state and city can help them, stating each dollar spent in an Oregon restaurant puts two dollars in the state's economy.
"There are plenty of places across the United States where snow and ice happen," Silverman said. "The city can respond, people can stay safe and go about their daily lives. That's just not the case here."
Some of their demands include more snowplows and salt on the roads, placing a moratorium on commercial evictions for three months and improved response times to outages.
"When we lose business, that means we're not buying beer and wine or not supporting our local farmers," said Aaron Baumhackl, co-owner and chief executive officer of Solstice Wood Fired Cafe in Hood River. "Everybody is feeling the impact."