Hospitality Minnesota Urging More Restaurant Funding

ACROSS MINNESOTA — Hospitality Minnesota, the association representing the state's hospitality workers, is urging the Minnesota congressional delegation to support a bill that would expand the Restaurant Revitalization Fund.

The bipartisan legislation would add $60 billion to the program with the goal of assisting small businesses that were denied a piece of the initial $28 billion fund, which was shut down on Wednesday.

The U.S. Small Business Association (SBA) received requests that totaled three times the amount of the program's allocated funding, Hospitality Minnesota said in a letter to the state's congressional delegation obtained by Patch. In Minnesota, over 2,500 restaurants who applied for funding did not receive any money.

Those restaurants, despite having been 100 percent closed to in-person dining for 138 days, still incurred costs relating to rent, mortgage, insurance, utilities, vendors and taxes, the letter said.

"It's going to take a couple years for a lot of these folks to dig out from that debt," said Ben Wogsland, director of government relations at Hospitality Minnesota. "This Restaurant Revitalization Fund is going to be able to help these businesses."

A survey conducted in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Explore Minnesota Tourism and Hospitality Minnesota found that 58 percent of the state's restaurants currently run the risk of financial collapse/insolvency within the next 6-12 months.

The state's restaurants lost a projected $3 billion in revenue last year, the letter said, and 56 percent of Minnesota foodservice operators have said that at the current trajectory, business conditions will not return to pre-pandemic levels until next year or later.

"I think there's a feeling on the part of the public, that they see these places are busy and think they're getting back to normal, but the reality is that these businesses were closed over the last year," Wogsland said. "What happened was, those restaurants took on a ton of debt just to be able to stay in business – because, while their revenue was slashed, their bills kept coming in."