Texas Bar Owners Plan 'Showdown' To Decry Business Closures

AUSTIN, TX — Bar owners from across the state have scheduled a protest on Friday to decry government-ordered closure of their establishments as a means to blunt spread of the coronavirus.

In true Texas fashion, organizers are calling the planned event a "showdown" to take place in front of the North Austin offices of the Texas Alcoholic and Beverage Commission regulatory agency.

“Our businesses are doomed,” co-owner Chris Polone of the Fort Worth bar The Rail Club Live said in a prepared statement. “Like I said before, we have nothing to lose. We can either fight this thing, or we can starve ourselves out.”

Gov. Greg Abbott on June 26 ordered bars across the state to close for a second time following an illness uptick after reopening businesses at limited occupancy staring on May 1. In later media interviews, Abbott expressed regret at having allowed the reopening of bars given such establishments are not conducive to the tactics of social distancing.

Bar owners have taken a financial hit amid closures, sharing their experiences in a Facebook page called "Texas Bars Fight Back!" Just this week, protest organizers noted in an advisory, the cancer-stricken owner of a Friendswood, Texas, bar named "Friends Pub" detailed a showdown with police as she attempted to partially open.

“The state’s health department has simply refused to provide any evidence justifying this devastating discrimination against Texas bars,” Wayne Dolcefino, president of the Houston investigative media firm Dolcefino Consulting, said in a prepared statement. “Small businesses across the state are being destroyed while restaurant bars are packed.”

Organizers said the planned protest follows a discovery by Dolcefino Consulting that currently, state health department officials "...aren’t even able to tie the spread of COVID-19 to Texas bars," officials wrote.

“With the outbreak spreading as quickly and widely as it has been over the past six weeks or so, it’s often difficult to pinpoint exactly where someone contracted a case because there has been so much transmission going on," the group quoted Chris Van Deusen, spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services as having said on Aug. 4. "We don’t yet have that level of detail from the big metro health departments and others that continue to do their own case investigations."

Dolcefino asked: “What are we doing? Why are we targeting bars and forcing them to close down when we can’t even pinpoint where someone contracted a case of COVID-19?”

In Pflugerville, Uncle Gary’s bar owner Gary Devito didn't mince words in expressing frustration: “If Abbott wants to f*** up Texas he has done a good job." Added the planned protest organizers: "It is that kind of anger that sets up the showdown Friday."

The demonstration is scheduled outside the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission headquarters at 5806 Mesa Dr. starting at noon on Friday.