Looking for a HEROES Act
Rep. Bustos, Savanna Mayor Lain cheer coronavirus revival and look to Congress for aid
Circa 1888 in Savanna is reviving outdoor dining, perhaps not quite at these close quarters from before the pandemic. (Facebook/Explore Savanna)
By Ted Cox
The third phase of the Restore Illinois plan to reopen the economy couldn’t come soon enough for Savanna, a town of about 3,000 on the Mississippi River.
“We are a tourism-based community, so we’ve been hit especially hard going into spring,” said Mayor Chris Lain on a video conference Friday with U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos.
They were chatting on the day that third phase took effect, easing restrictions on the statewide stay-at-home order and allowing businesses like hair salons to reopen, while restaurants rushed to accommodate outdoor dining.
Lain said the small river town was closing down side streets and bringing in park picnic tables to Main Street so restaurants “can adjust to this new temporary reality that we have” with expanded outdoor seating areas.
The Moline congresswoman, meanwhile, was drawing on Lain’s expertise as “a small-business owner himself” who “can help the small-business owners in his community and know firsthand what it is like.”
Bustos said, “Will things get better?”
“I believe they will,” Lain replied. “We’ve got to be safe,” he added. “But we’re opening up our outside dining. Our state park is back open,” Mississippi Palisades State Park, with some of the best views and rock climbing in otherwise flat Illinois. And the 60-mile bike trail to the Quad Cities is once again inviting, as are the rolling roadways in the area that typically attract bikers of the motorcycle variety.
But in hopefully looking forward he also took a glance back at the damage done by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown intended to slow its spread, which wreaked havoc on businesses across the state and the nation.
“Economically, we’ve been hit pretty hard,” Lain said. Four businesses closed and will not reopen, including a new restaurant that launched just two weeks ahead of Gov. Pritzker’s original stay-at-home order issued in March. “That’s a tough one,” Lain said, adding that one bar closed as well, along with a hair salon and a fitness center.
“In a small town, these are your friends and your neighbors,” Lain said. “But we’re a very strong community and very resilient.”
Yet there’s a new business, too, opening this spring — the aptly named Victory Ice Cream, a traditional scoop-shop parlor that seems ready-made for the revival, which prompted both Lain and Bustos to recall their days as teenage employees of ice-cream outlets.
As mayor, however, Lain had to navigate a revised city budget “with the uncertainty of where we’re going to be six months from now.” Will tourists return in the numbers of years past?
“We’re very sales-tax driven, being a tourist community,” Lain said.
The budget took an estimated hit of $130,000, “which doesn’t seem like a lot,” he said, “but when you’re a small community that was an additional police officer,” and perhaps another city truck too.
That’s why both Bustos and Lain emphasized the importance of the HEROES Act, the latest congressional coronavirus relief package, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives last month, but is thus far languishing in the Senate.
“I really, really hope that Sen. Mitch McConnell takes up this bill,” Bustos said of the Senate majority leader from Kentucky. “And we can get that money out to not just Savanna, but towns across the state of Illinois and frankly throughout the nation.”
Bustos pointed out that about a third of the $3 trillion allotted in the bill would go to state and local governments such as towns and counties. States got a boost in funding to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic in an earlier relief bill, but that did little to make up for lost tax revenue, while towns under 250,000 in population and counties under 500,000 got nothing in that relief package.
Gov. Pritzker has repeatedly emphasized that states and local governments are going to need that aid from the federal government — not as a bailout, but because they have nowhere else to go to make up those funding losses.
“The help from that HEROES Act will be very important to us,” Lain said. “Our largest sales-tax producers have been either closed or way down,” he added, pointing to a local car dealership. Closing bars, meanwhile, also shut off local revenue from gaming machines as well.
Bustos said there are 150 towns in her congressional district stretching across northwest Illinois, all experiencing the same shortfalls. “Multiply what you’re seeing in Savanna by 150,” she said, not to mention towns statewide and nationally.
Lain said his restaurant business received “a huge amount of support from our community,” during the economic lockdown, in the form of carryout orders. It and other local businesses also benefited somewhat from the Paycheck Protection Program and a disaster grant. “We were helped pretty quickly by both those programs,” he granted.
Bustos touted changes recently made in the PPP allowing more flexibility in hiring requirements and other uses of the funds, along with an extended term of loans and a move to bring in community banks and credit unions, not just major banks. She called the changes “hopefully more reasonable requirements to help our small businesses.”
Both applauded the long-awaited move to the third phase to Restore Illinois, with Bustos calling it “an important day for those small businesses.”
“We’re having to get used to this new temporary normal, but we are strong communities here in northwest Illinois, and we are going to come out of this bigger and better and stronger than we ever have,” Lain said. He added that he’d already noticed “a willingness to work together that I have not seen before and to make things better and to work as a team to succeed. So I think we’re going to build on that.”