With local economies set to try to reopen in little more than a week, Senator Bill Cassidy says getting money to municipal services like trash collection is just as important as helping businesses like restaurants reopen.
“Imagine we put all this money into keeping a restaurant open, but we don’t have sanitation workers and garbage builds up in front of the restaurant and rats are running around the garbage, no one is going to eat at that restaurant,” said Cassidy. “So I do think we need to support cities and states as they try to keep those essential businesses open.”
Senator Cassidy says he and New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez have created the State and Municipal Aid for Recovery and Transition Fund…or SMART Fund Bill to do just that.
If passed, it will create an additional 500 billion dollars on top of the existing 150 billion in the CARES Act.
One major Louisiana industry hit hard by the coronavirus economic shut down is the seafood industry, which struggled before the coronavirus because of the recent opening of the Bonnet Carre Spillway.
“The opening of the Bonnet Carre put a lot of freshwater through Lake Pontchartrain which really messed up the ecosystem as you go out into the Gulf of Mexico,” said Casidy. “So that has had a terrible impact, I talked to the oyster fisherman, but the other thing is this who coronavirus. Restaurants normally buy a lot of seafood…restaurants are told to shut down, a lot of seafood is not being purchased.”
