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May 26, 2020

City businesses mostly ‘pass’ holiday-weekend muster

PHOTO | New Haven BIZ U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal at the podium in front of City Hall Tuesday morning with Mayor Justin Elicker.
By Michael C. Bingham

In a normal year in Connecticut, the three-day Memorial Day weekend is not typically the occasion of an orgy of shopping and restaurant dining outside of beachfront (the Connecticut shoreline, Cape Cod) and mountain (the Berkshires, Vermont) summer getaway destinations.

This is not a normal year.

Instead, in Connecticut the first “official” weekend of summer was a testbed for the initial phase of business reopenings that began last Wednesday (May 20) and included restaurants (for takeout and outdoor dining) and retail stores.

In New Haven, at least, the early results were encouraging — at least from a public-safety point of view.

City Public Health Director Maritza Bond said her office received only one complaint about a business not complying with the safety rules accompanying the partial reopening. “Overall businesses were compliant this weekend,” Bond reported Tuesday morning. “We received only one complaint about a drive-through restaurant.”

The scofflaw was a chain fast-food restaurant she declined to name (saying only it was a fast-food eatery on Whalley Ave.), where employees were observed not wearing the mandated masks. Egad.

But that was the only complaint she received over the long weekend. “So that’s pretty good, right?” she said.

Bond’s comments came as part of the first in-person press briefing hosted by the office of Mayor Justin Elicker since the COVID pandemic’s arrival in full force two months ago consigned the almost-daily pressers to the Zoomosphere.

For Tuesday morning’s get-together on the steps of City Hall, Elicker was joined by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who touted the potential benefits of the proposed third round federal economic-relief package known as the Heroes Act. The nearly $3 trillion bill introduced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) narrowly (208-199) passed the U.S. House of Representatives on May 15. Blumenthal said its passage would provide more than $181 million in direct aid to New Haven — a sum larger than that earmarked for any other Connecticut city.

As written, the Heroes Act is said to have little to no chance of passage by the U.S. Senate when the upper chamber reconvenes next week.

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