Senator Collins, can you hear us?
When our hospitality industry faced an economic disaster, we turned to our elected officials in Washington to ask for help. Three of the four members of our Congressional delegation responded. One did not.
On March 16 we turned out the lights and locked the doors at the Hunt + Alpine Club not knowing when, or if, we would open again. For the last seven years we have built a loyal and dedicated following at Hunt + Alpine — the bar we operate in Portland, Maine. We weren’t getting rich, but we have enjoyed a brisk summer tourist business and the year-round loyalty of our friends and neighbors. It has been enough to employ 12 people, pay our vendors, and keep the lights on in a community we love.
But for us and millions of other small business owners across the country, everything changed in early March. Local and state leaders made the sensible choice to order non-essential businesses closed. And today, two months later, we still don’t know what the future will hold.
We knew the federal government was going to have to do something to keep the economy from collapsing and they were going to have to act fast. We also knew that our industry — the hospitality industry — was not only going to be particularly hard hit by closures but also has some unique needs. We wanted to make sure policy makers took them into consideration when they were putting together a bailout. So we quickly put together a simple, one-page letter to Maine’s Congressional delegation asking them to focus on three specific policies that would help ensure that we could take care of our businesses and our employees. We asked our delegation to address the immediate needs of small businesses and our employees affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, including addressing rent and staffing concerns and immediate economic assistance. Within 48 hours we had 250 Maine hospitality businesses sign the letter, and we sent it off to our Congressional delegation.
When Congress passed the CARES Act and we first heard about the Paycheck Protection Act (PPP), we were hopeful that our concerns had been heard and we might be getting the lifeline we needed to save our business. Sadly, that has not turned out to be the case. We’ve all heard about the big corporations that went to the front of the line and vacuumed up a huge share of the cash in the first round of the PPP. And the lack of information and rapidly changing rules that made it hard to know exactly how the program would work. But for small businesses like ours, when we were finally able to get a turn at accessing PPP, the program turned out to be something very different than what was originally advertised. The key feature of the program is loan forgiveness. We can’t afford to take on debt in this uncertain economy, so the PPP only makes sense is if we can take advantage of the forgiveness provision — but that requires us to put employees back to work in the first eight weeks after being granted a loan — a time when both state and local leaders made it very clear we could not operate and do business.
So we wrote a second letter. We explained the problems with the PPP and urged our Congressional delegation to fix them. Again, over 200 of our fellow business owners quickly joined us in signing that letter and we sent it off to our Congressional delegation.
In both cases, we quickly heard back from three of the four members of Maine’s small Congressional delegation. Both House members and Senator Angus King got back to us. And we felt heard. But even to this date, we haven’t even gotten an acknowledgment from our senior Senator, Susan Collins, for either letter. What makes this particularly frustrating is that Collins has gone to great lengths to claim credit for creating the PPP. But when it comes to the significant problems that have come with the program, she is nowhere to be found.
We’ve got a small delegation — just two House members along with our two Senators. The State of Maine in many ways is a tight-knit community. And like any strong community, we need to rely on each other in tough times. But Senator Collins seems more interested in listening to her friends in Washington and the big corporations that support her campaigns. (Many of the same big banks that have made over $10 billion in fees on the PPP program have contributed over $400,000 to her campaigns.)
Senator Collins likes to talk about her work supporting small businesses. But if she really does care about Maine businesses, she needs to acknowledge the problems with the program she says she created and get to work fixing it.
