Click HERE to watch video presentation of Special President’s Message Update on COVID-19
During the past month, the Elmhurst Chamber of Commerce & Industry has worked diligently on our member’s behalf to assure that federal, state and local agencies and elected officials understand the economic damage that COVID-19 and the related public policy responses have inflicted on the Elmhurst business community in general and our members in particular.
We are e-mailing our more than 540 members with daily updates on federal and state financial assistance programs now available to small businesses and not-for-profit organizations, posting those updates to the home page of our Chamber’s website and sharing them via our Facebook and Twitter social media pages.
In partnership with the City of Elmhurst, we are promoting restaurants and bars offering curbside pick-up, walk-in takeout and delivery services to hungry patrons during the dine-in shutdown, and we are looking to expand our website’s Menus at a Glance module to include hyperlinks to facilitate online ordering.
While we are facing a potential recession unlike no other in America’s history—one that is public health based as opposed to a marketplace correction, such as the housing crash during the Great Recession of 2017-19—Federal Reserve Bank Chair Jerome Powell on March 26 reported that the $20 trillion U.S. economy is still fundamentally sound and will be able to rebound once this pandemic has abated. In response, the Fed dropped its lending interest rate to zero percent.
During our 18th Annual Economic Outlook Luncheon on February 7, Keynote Speaker William Strauss, Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, reported that there were no financial indicators foreshadowing a downtown in America’s economy—excluding a “negative economic shock” that typically brings about periods of recession.
It was in late January that a 35-year-old Washington man who had recently visited Wuhan, China, became the first confirmed COVID-19 patient in the U.S. Since then, the U.S. has surpassed China with the most confirm cases in the world at nearly 92,000 and counting, including more than 1,300 deaths, or a fatality rate of 1.5 percent. Of the more than 2,500 cases in Illinois, twenty-six of our fellow residents have passed.
I believe that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker will extend his “Stay at Home” Executive Order for at least two weeks past its April 7 expiration date and, mostly like, through the end of April
Let me now assure all of our Chamber members that your business or organization will remain a member in good standing even if you are no longer able to pay your annual dues or make your monthly dues payments, starting with those who are scheduled to be billed on April 1. If need be, we will extend that dues policy on a month-by-month basis.
That being said, our Chamber is in the same boat as many small businesses and not-for-profits. We are dependent on our “customers” to continue to do business with us as usual in order to make payroll and keep our doors open. We are not funded by the public’s tax dollar, whether generated from property taxes, food and beverage retail sales, or hotel/motel room rentals.
Membership dues revenue covers only 60 percent of our operating budget, so we need to generate $100,000 in non-dues revenues to cover the shortfall. Like you, we have already cancelled numerous programs, services and events that generate non-dues revenue.
We have accessed our Line of Credit at Community Bank of Elmhurst in hopes of weathering this pandemic and will likely seek assistance from through relief programs offered by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), Illinois State Treasurer’s Office, Illinois Department of Economic Opportunity (IDCEO) and the federal government, which just appropriated $2.2 trillion in funding for a third COVID-19 economic relief bill, includng $350 million for small businesses and not-for-profits
I want to reassure you of my commitment to our shared cause.
Let me close by paraphrasing Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill character in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie classic “North-By-Northwest,” by simply saying that I have a job, an Office Manager, three ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don’t intend to disappoint them all by getting myself slightly sick.