I don't really know how this town can even remain without the grocery store... the people who live in Point Roberts cannot exactly easily just drive over the border and back into WA at Blaine to grocery shop. People from Point Roberts have a very hard time getting over the border and back into WA at Blaine to go to a doctor's appointment...SamSpade wrote: ↑June 25th, 2021, 6:13 pm Sad update on the continued downhill slide of the situation here:
Food crisis feared on Washington peninsula isolated by border as only grocery teeters on closure
Hopefully more media attention will somehow assist this business out.
I am disappointed but not surprised Washington has not done more to assist businesses with lost revenue during this period. Many states did not do much, thousands of businesses have probably already closed throughout the state, but this is a very extraordinary situation with this large grocery store in Point Roberts.
There was Federal COVID Relief Money available then allocated to the states to be spent at the discretion of the states, and one thing the states could do was to assist small businesses with lost revenue. I don't want to go to politics here but based on what happened here, if this business had been in, say, South Dakota, they would have almost certainly received $500,000 of that Federal COVID Relief Money twice out of the South Dakota Small Business Aid Program... (there were 2 rounds) which would have covered quite a few months expenses at $30,000 a month...
The above program was in addition to Paycheck Protection Program (assuming loss of revenue was so much that the PPP did not cover it- which in the case of this store I'm sure it didn't).
This store got two rounds of Paycheck Protection Program funds and got almost $300k total through that. So that helped them for at best 10 months. The store has been cut off now for about 15 months so they certainly tried to weather this mess.
https://www.federalpay.org/paycheck-pro ... roberts-wa
Again not wanting to go into politics here but really wondering if the way this border crossing is being handled and this problem basically being ignored despite constant pleas from the residents of the Point Roberts for over a year now, is a tactic to literally bleed the situation out and just get Point Roberts officially transferred to Canada.