SACRAMENTO - Senator Scott Wiener’s (D-San Francisco) Bar and Restaurant Recovery Act, Senate Bill 314, passed the Senate with bipartisan unanimous vote. SB 314 will extend the popular and successful outdoor dining and parklet regulations currently in place because of the pandemic. SB 314 will help California’s restaurants, bars, and music venues recover economically from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic by creating more flexibility in how they can serve alcohol, including where they can serve and how they can share spaces with other businesses.
Restaurants and bars across the state have made use of expanded outdoor seating and service areas, allowing them to stay open and survive the pandemic. This expanded outdoor dining with alcohol has also been wildly popular with the public, giving our cities a more European street life feel. Expanded outdoor dining has the potential to make our cities more vibrant, lively and prosperous.
Combined with other critical measures, SB 314 will help the hospitality industry bounce back from the devastating impacts of the pandemic, enacting common sense reforms, restructuring outdated laws, and allowing businesses more opportunities to succeed.
The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated small businesses — particularly in the hospitality industry. Bars and restaurants have either been closed or operating at reduced capacity. Music venues have been closed entirely. Many of our local businesses have permanently shut down since March, after months of negative revenues and low capacity numbers made it difficult to stay afloat. We have a responsibility to make it easier for small businesses to bounce back and stay open, and to ease the burden of unnecessarily difficult and antiquated regulations that keep our businesses from thriving.
SB 314 will also help workers in the service industry by increasing service jobs. Small businesses employ 35.8% of California’s workforce, and thousands of service workers have been laid off from their jobs since March 2020. COVID-19 has eliminated a stable source of income for many service workers. Along with the lack of a stable income, laid-off service workers may now face food insecurity, an increased risk of eviction and homelessness, increased emotional distress and anxiety (coupled with lack of healthcare), and fewer resources to pay for childcare. The impacted communities are primarily low- and middle-income workers of color, who faced many of these issues before the pandemic struck and are now in even more challenging situations.
SB 314 makes the following common sense changes to the alcohol rules governing restaurants and bars:
SB 314 is a bipartisan bill, with Carlos Villapudua (D-Stockton) and Bill Quirk (D-Hayward) serving as principal co-authors. It is co-authored by Senator Andreas Borgeas (R-Fresno) and Senator Jim Nielsen (R-Red Bluff), and Assemblymembers David Chiu (D-San Francisco), Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles), Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), Adam Gray (D-Merced), Cecilia Aguiar Curry (D-Napa), Chad Mayes (I-Rancho Mirage), and Eduardo Garcia (D-Imperial).
“Expanded outdoor dining has been a good thing to come out of this difficult time,” said Senator Wiener. “When you walk around our streets, our cities and towns feel lively and energetic, and many of our bars and restaurants are filled to the brim with outdoor patrons. Hospitality businesses like these are deeply important to our communities, and they’ve been hit hard by the pandemic. We need to help them get through this time, and come out on the other end of the pandemic thriving. People enjoy outdoor dining with alcohol, and it just makes sense to keep this practice and give bars and restaurants more flexibility.”
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