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Paycheck Protection Program can keep workers paid, but it won't save bars, restaurants, industry leaders warn

The program provides relief for some bar and restaurant owners in New Orleans, but others still question how they'll stay afloat.

NEW ORLEANS — For Polly Watts, owner of The Avenue Pub, the Paycheck Protection Program meant to help small businesses keep their workers on the payroll aligns directly with the biggest challenge she’s faced since her bar closed due to state and local mandates.

“It focuses on my employees," Watts said. "The money flows through me, but it’s designed and aimed to keep my employees on payroll and their benefits intact."

Keeping her workers paid is at the top of Watt’s mind, but she believes this pandemic could lead to the permanent closure of bars and restaurants throughout the city.

“Their biggest challenge is not actually paying their staff, their biggest challenge is paying their rent or paying their mortgage,” Watts said.

Under the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program, loans will be fully forgiven is if the funds are used for payroll costs, interest on mortgages, rent and utilities, but 75 percent of the forgiven amount must be used for payroll.

“That’s fine, but when you are talking about a business that isn’t open anyway, we don’t have payroll,” Mark Schettler, General Manager at Bar Tonique, said.

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While the Paycheck Protection Program may be on the money for Watts, for many other business owners it doesn’t quite fit the bill.

“I mean, I think the people who are still operating in a limited capacity, you're just hoping you're making enough to pay your bills to keep your rent paid and things,” Schettler said. “For us in the French Quarter, rent ain't cheap.”

It’s a scenario he says industry workers continue to face.

“We're in the same position that the workers are constantly in just like, nobody cares,” he said. “There never has been (support for people in the service industry). I mean, everything that we have we built for ourselves.”

While he isn’t sure about a bailout from the federal government being the answer, Schettler wants payment protection for service industry workers who are doing what they can to survive. It’s an issue that draws an emotion we’re all feeling.

“It’s not good,” he said. “We're showing up to try to take care of people and it hurts when it's not reciprocated.”

Mark told us he personally doesn’t expect to be back to work until July, but hopes to open the bar back up in June. That is, if we don’t see another extension in the stay at home mandate.

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