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Ban on LA County In-Person Dining to Take Effect on Wednesday; Pasadena Restaurants Not Affected

Published on Tuesday, November 24, 2020 | 4:25 pm
 
Photo by James Carbone

A ban prohibiting in-person dining at L.A. County restaurants will go into effect at 10 p.m. on Wednesday.

Pasadena will not be impacted by the ban.

At Monday’s Pasadena City Council meeting city officials announced they were still monitoring the data and were not shuttering in-person dining.

But late Tuesday afternoon, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors rejected a motion by Supervisors Kathryn Barger and Janice Hahn to reconsider the ban on outdoor dining being imposed due to a surge in coronavirus cases.

The ban was announced Sunday night when the county’s five-day average of daily new cases topped the threshold of 4,000.

The threshold was established by the county last week, along with a more restrictive tier that would trigger a new stay-at-home order if the daily five-day case average topped 4,500. The county reached that threshold Monday.

The county restriction ends in-person dining for three weeks.

“Businesses have made incredible sacrifices to align with safety protocols to remain open in order to pay their bills and feed their families,” Supervisor Barger said. “Our hospitalization rates are among the lowest we’ve seen. Yet, the rationale for further closures is tied to the number of patients in the hospital. We’ve come a long way to support workers and residents who are struggling to stay afloat and should not regress on the progress we’ve made.”

The Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation predicted that approximately 700,000 jobs in the food industry would be lost during this shutdown.

The LAEDC also highlighted that approximately 75% of all projected job losses would be those earning $50,000 or less.

The California Restaurant Association unsuccessfully attempted to stop the action with a restraining order. A judge did allow a lawsuit to continue.

“The recent order with no stated scientific basis from L.A. County singles out a specific industry and could jeopardize thousands of jobs,” Jot Condie, president/CEO of the California Restaurant Association, said in a statement announcing the legal challenge. “There are thousands of restaurants and many thousands more employees who could be out on the street right before the holiday season.”

Association attorney Dennis Ellis told reporters he was disappointed in the ruling, but said the organization hasn’t seen any evidence that outdoor dining — which was already restricted to half of overall capacity last week — has fueled the coronavirus surge.

“We have not been able to see what the county has to support the notion that outdoor dining at 50% capacity, consistent with what the governor has authorized in his blueprint, is inappropriate and needs to be shut down,” Ellis said.

“Outdoor dining is probably more dangerous in terms of contagion than any other kind of business,” Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said earlier. She said diners at restaurants “sit for hours with no masks on” and are in close proximity to servers and patrons walking by.

Long Beach, which has its own health department, also plans to bar in-person dining Wednesday night. The Long Beach Restaurant Association blasted the move and plans to hold a news conference Wednesday demanding a meeting with city and county health officials.

In a statement, the association accused health officials of attacking an “easy target” to blame for the surge in cases, without any evidence.

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