Dear Chamber Members,
I just wanted to send a thanks out to our Chamber members for their continued diligence in trying to find ways to best prepare and adapt to the “Covid Crisis”. We have held multiple small focus groups and the dialogue has been outstanding and is helping us as a business community navigate this unprecedented challenge. For those of us that have been “open” and trying to best navigate and implement new operating standards, we have learned and continue to learn every day how to protect our employees, our guests and our community. The greatest challenges I believe are still ahead of us. As the weather warms and the restrictions on the surrounding populous areas are lessened, we will have greater number of second home owners, vacationers, and drive through vehicles come through our community. Our State Leaders today opened back up our State Parks for all visitors along with the cancellation of formal school for the rest of the year will also push the numbers up.
I have attached several pages of the revised version of “Utah Leads Together” that was published today by our State Leaders. As you can see Utah is on the forefront of coming out of the “Urgent Phase” and entering the “Stabilization Phase”. This appears to be close with an expected date of around the end of the month. This is good news for the business community. One caution is that this phase is projected to last the entire summer for us. Hopefully it will shorten in its projected duration but we must be prepared to operate in this environment in each of our businesses. We as a chamber encourage each of you to with specific attention being on pages 8-10. Our summer food offerings and retail establishments in the down town area need to pay specific attention to recommendations on how to implement crowd control measures in front of their establishments. All retail and recreational services are subject to this as well. There are great recommendations for the short term vacation rental operators as well. The closest category would be hotels and lodging providers. We strongly encourage you to take serious these guidelines and find ways that we can welcome with open arms our paying guests and demonstrate our concerns for their safety, our own employees, and our community. Signage coupled with that personal touch of reinforcement of good practices will go along way in helping us through this and not having something happen that risks shut downs of our most important summer months. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to reach out to us, our Mayor, the Bear River Health Department and our county officials. We as a chamber leadership will do all we can to help us all navigate this time and make the best of a very trying time.
We encourage you to be aware of all the businesses in our community and find ways to work together and support one another. No one has all the answers but hopefully we can learn together and find ways to support and come through this with the best possible economic outcome. If we take serious these measures and demonstrate “best operational practices” , it will help us gain trust of the local non business community as well. We as a county have a high number of elderly residents and they are weary of what this summer will bring. Let’s do our part to be creative and find ways to get through this together.
We will continue next week with more focus groups. We encourage you to participate and bring your lessons learned and insight so we can share that with the broader group.
Sincerely,
Mark Smoot
Chamber President