Reston Business Community Poised For Phase 1 Of Reopening

RESTON, VA — Just like other businesses and organizations affected by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's stay-at-home order, the Greater Reston Chamber of Commerce has had to adapt to the new normal in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Now with Fairfax County and the rest of Northern Virginia about to enter the first phase of Northam's four-stage reopening, Patch reached out to Chamber CEO and President Charles Kapur to see how the Reston business community has weathered the partial shutdown and what concerns business owners have about reopening.

Patch: What has the Chamber been doing during the stay-at-home period?

Charles Kapur: We started with teleworking back in mid-March, took a couple of days to familiarize ourselves with some of these virtual platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom. And once I felt good about that, we decided to close up the office, and I go in about once a week to check the mail and sign checks.

How has the coronavirus impacted the Reston business community?

The impact has been profound here in our area. When you look at Reston, we've got such a diverse economic community of so many different business sectors. Most prominently our restaurant-hospitality providers have been just really hit so hard. There are a number of our restaurants and we've been promoting them almost from day one through our social media and on our website of keeping the community aware of which restaurants are open, which ones are doing takeout and delivery, which ones unfortunately are closing down. ... The faster we can get to a point where we can safely allow these restaurants to open up their dining spaces and consumers feel comfortable going back in under the state of social distancing and cleanliness practices is really going to be helpful for our restaurants.

So many of our great hotels that are in the area that are seeing huge reduction in their operations, in their labor forces, whatever the process is for when we are allowed and we are comfortable, I guess those are two different things to be able to gather in large groups sufficiently where people may start looking at holding conferences and trade shows or banquets at some of these larger venues and hotels will certainly be a much needed change for that sector.

Northern Virginia has a large contracting community. How well has that sector weathered the coronavirus?

From some of our largest contractors, there's a bit of stability. At the Chamber, we work with a lot of smaller subcontractors, government contractors. There seems to be a little more enthusiasm or at least optimism I'd say, in how they've dealt with it.

A lot of those folks, they've been able to maintain the majority of their work, maintain a majority of their contracts as the governments have continued to maintain operations, and a lot of those folks, depending on the nature of their work, may have client sites that have remained open, and so they're continuing to go in or they were in the habit of teleworking anyway. So I would say that they've not been as hard hit.

But, that being said, there is this guarded optimism, because there's not this sense of overwhelming comfort about how the next six to 18 months is going to look like as we look to fully recover, when we start to go into a new fiscal cycle, what some of these contract vehicles might look like, what some of these changes in purchase orders and things like that may look like for some of these contractors.

What do you think of the local government's response to helping businesses during this period?

There have been a fair number of initiatives. Just last month, Fairfax County issued their micro-loan program. The response to that was highly overwhelming. In fact, they had the allocation of funds of that program, if I recall correctly, were accounted for within the first day of applications that came into their system. Fortunately, we heard news that the Board of Supervisors approved an additional grant program, the Fairfax Rise program, with $25 million allocated to that grant program. That's scheduled to launch June 1. We're very happy to hear that this program, unlike the program that was issued last month, will also include nonprofits. The first program was eligible to for-profits operating within the county. This program is even more robustly funded than the last one and provide an opportunity for nonprofits to be able to be eligible for funding that can help sustain their operations. Similar to the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program], this program is designed to provide funding based on employment, size of the company and allow those dollars to be forgivable grants.

As we move toward reopening, is there a concern in the business community about the speed at which things could return to normal?

I think that's really dependent on each individual business, if they're going to be businesses that are just going to be harder pressed to be able to have the means to wait out an extended delay and some business will be in a better position than others. ... I think the bigger issue will be will we continue to see that trend emerge where the rest of the state is progressing towards the subsequent phases that the governor is looking to employ. And will Northern Virginia continuously be a step behind? I think that's maybe more worrisome in this marketplace.

What about the impact the closures and delayed reopening has had on the local workforce?

When this finally starts to flatten out and we start to move ahead where we're going to be able to take a look at what was the true impact of this, from an unemployment standpoint, a job displacement standpoint, I've heard some comments from folks that are forecasting that Northern Virginia, relative to the rest of the state and relative to maybe even the national average, will hopefully fare well because of the concentration of contractors and folks that are working with the local or federal government. But, we're not going unscathed. There's going to be folks that are going to be displaced. And the question is, are those jobs coming back? Will those jobs just be waiting to be refilled or are those jobs gone?

What steps is the Chamber taking to help these displaced workers?

I am representing the Reston Chamber in an initiative that's bringing together members of other Northern Virginia Chambers, along with members of our local places of higher education, and other industry leaders into an initiative called the NOVA Back to Work Leadership Task Force. The primary purpose of this task force is to come together to advocate for the continual support of funding for our workforce development, training and education, looking at those certification programs and those educational programs that allow people to be retrained or improve their skills if their jobs are displaced, to be able to move into sectors where openings exist. And, bearing in mind that the state is going to have to make some decisions and the local counties are going to have to make some decisions about their budget coming out of this. We're working with our leaders to ensure that this means that this is maintained as a priority of that. That is a mechanism to help mitigate the impact that COVID's going to have on employment here in our region.

What else has the Chamber done to help its member businesses?

We sort of position ourselves as an opportunity for members to come in and engage with the other members of the business community in the things you expect from a chamber of commerce, right? Outward events, networking mixers, educational workshops and conferences. So, we've pivoted from that. Over the last two months, our programming has been focused on fast, nimble response to our members, delivery of time-sensitive and critical information related to the pandemic. We established a coronavirus community resources page on our website. It is a portal to allow members to have up-to-date access to information from state, local, and federal government. We're posting Gov. Northam's briefings there. When there is notice of these grant and loan programs put out through the county and the state, we're providing that information to our members, as well as some other private grant or funding programs.

Also see ...

• Northam Announces Face Mask Policy, NoVA Reopening To Be Allowed
• Northam Executive Order Allows NoVA To Delay Phase 1 Reopening
• It's All Business For Reston Chamber's New President