Downtown Manhattan businesses are slowly coming back open after the Riley County Health Department cleared some of them to reopen as part of a phased local approach.
Downtown Manhattan, Inc. Executive Director Gina Scroggs tells KMAN the approach has been one of caution by business owners.
“Each business has really decided how they can best keep the public and their employees safe and so they’ve really gone about the reopening much slower and more thoughtfully than I think we all had envisioned,” she said.
Scroggs says those downtown establishments are delicately balancing how a business is operating now and how they’ll operate in the future based on consumer confidence.
“We’re trying to adjust all the time to meet the needs of the patrons and how they are feeling about the reopening of the economy,” she said.
Scroggs says businesses that are open now are getting creative with how they deliver their services. Some are doing one in and one out operations, while others are offering services by appointment only or posting signage to limit the number of patrons in the building at a given time.
Scroggs says so far there haven’t been any businesses that have had to cease operations but admits the situation is one that will have long-term impacts on a number of retailers.
“Just because our economy reopened doesn’t mean those that are still standing are still standing, we’re going to have to literally look at this sometimes day-by-day, but most definitely every few weeks, every month, it’s going to be a new evaluation,” she said.
A big reason Scroggs says businesses are being so cautious with their reopening phases is because they don’t want a repeat of the actions that had to take place in March when the health department was forced to shut down many businesses due to community spread of the virus. That she says would be disastrous.
For more information on a specific business, visit downtownmhk.com.
Scroggs was our guest on In Focus Friday, May 8. To hear her full interview, click here.
