Business Roundtable – 8/24/2021 – 10:00 am
MISSION: success in two stages of the Coronavirus threat:
1.) response to the immediate threat
2.) economic recovery when the threat diminishes.
Recap
Response to immediate threat:
1. General Conversation. Vaccine Mandates Increasingly Dominate Business Issues. CHOMP has 17 Covid-19 patients in the hospital, this is well under the winter surge peak of 70 patients, but the number is up, and they are imposing visitor restrictions again. Triage tents are back up. The vast majority of positive tests are in unvaccinated people. There have been fatalities in vaccinated patients, but they had co-morbidities that compromised their immune system. Like the Monterey Bay Aquarium and other large California health care systems and corporations, Montage Health will be adopting a policy that requires employees to be fully vaccinated or take a COVID-19 test within 72 hours. Employees who do not comply will no longer continue employment.
2. Financial, SBA, Loans, & Grants. California Relief Grants- Round 7 is ongoing, Round 8 begins August 27th, Round 9 begins September 9th. Webinars available on how to apply are offered in multiple languages.
3. Education. Hartnell College has roughly the same number of students enrolled this year as last. Classes are split between online and in-person. The new Nursing and Allied Health building on West Alisal on the main campus is progressing-it will open in Spring 2022. The college is not seeing a surge in re-entry (older) students as in the recession in the latter part of the 2000’s. Although there are widespread reports of people changing careers and jobs.
4.Regional Public Power. Central Coast Community Energy (3CE), the successor agency to Monterey Bay Community Power, is promoting its transportation electrification programs. Learn more here. The agency is also adopting a new vendor registration program as part of their effort to increasing the participation of small and local diverse businesses in all phases of 3CE’s purchasing.
3CE will soon include 33 local agencies in five counties, with King City and City of Santa Barbara establishing their own community choice aggregation public power agencies and the unincorporated areas of San Luis Obispo County maintaining PG&E as their sole electricity supplier. Some of the Santa Barbara communities joining 3CE are served by SoCal Edison rather than PG&E as an investor-owned public utility. Public meetings of this agency’s governing and advisory boards can be found here. Remember, this is YOUR power agency.
5. Monterey Regional Airport. Avelo reports that their new service start up at MRY is postponed. They have decided that it is best for them to delay the start of service until Q1 of 2022 rather than start at the end of September as planned. They indicated that sales had softened quite a bit, a phenomenon they attribute to the COVID 19 spike.
Next teleconference will be held Tuesday, September 7 at 10:00am. Speaker will be Norm Groot-Executive Director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau
