Here is a transcript of the Radio Free Lewisburg podcast interview with Bob Garrett of the Greater Susquehanna Valley Chamber of Commerce from the day before Snyder County went Green. It continues to be relevant, with other counties shifting to green over time. In it, in case you're wondering, Bob mentions masks thirteen times in the context of stressing the importance of wearing them for businesses and the economy during the green phase. As he says toward the end, "Wear your mask. If you’re going to be in public, if you’re going to be around other people, wear your mask. It makes perfect sense and it is truly, at the end of the day, an act of kindness."
Episode 8: Going Green
Julie Hagenbuch
Our state is reopening amidst the coronavirus crisis and so to help us understand what that means for our region, Sam spoke with Bob Garrett, the president and CEO of the Greater Susquehanna Valley Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, May 28.
Bob Garrett
My name is Bob Garrett, I’m president and CEO of the Greater Susquehanna Valley Chamber of Commerce. So, it’s pretty much everything around the confluence of the north and west branches of the Susquehanna River. By name, those counties are Montour, Northumberland, Union, and Snyder. Of course, we have members outside of that area. We are a membership organization. We claim 700 members representing about 54,000 employees. Now, I always have to sort of put an asterisk by that number – that’s a big number – that’s a lot of people. That means that there’s no one living in the greater Susquehanna Valley that’s more than one or two deviations away from a chamber member. Keep in mind, 35,000 of those 54,000 members work for the Geisinger, but we do represent a lot of employees, a lot of employers, a lot of agencies, a lot of organizations, and as I say, I’m the cheerleader for all of them. And, you know, a lot of people ask, “now, what do chambers do?” What chambers do, is at our core function, we connect a business that makes something with a business that needs something. So, we’re a business-to-business organization. We also try to support the business-to-consumer, business-to-traveler – we make those connections. We are a connecting organization. As we like to say though, we do every day here at the Greater Susquehanna Valley Chamber of Commerce what most people think just happens.
Sam Pearson
It’s great to hear how you are, you know, you literally have your finger on the pulse. You have to be aware of how things are happening, what the cycles are in the year, and looking ahead in business cycles. Of course, we now are all contending with one of the biggest disruptions to all of those cycles. We have the COVID-19 pandemic. So, how has your work at the Chamber had to change with the onset of COVID-19?
Bob Garrett
Before the governor – and I think he did the right thing – before the governor closed down our state, and if you remember he closed it down county by county, region by region, just the way he’s reopening our state. Before he did that we had in our hands, something that we were calling, “responsible reentry.” We were already anticipating a business shutdown and in fact I thought it was going to be more dire than it was, more drastic than it was, and we were planning for that even then, and making plans for our businesses to be able to survive, and potentially, thrive coming out of this pandemic.
Sam Pearson
Yeah, I’ve really appreciated that responsible reentry document that you generated and have been sharing that on social media and pointing people to it on your website. It’s been really valuable, and like you said, the fact that it sort of prefigured the governor’s plan was helpful as well just it’s parallel messaging that’s just as strong on the importance of public health to business. So, that has been really helpful. Have you found it easy or hard to get people on the same page about public health?
Bob Garrett
Yeah, this has not been a walk in the park. I mean I would be Pollyanna if I told you that all I had to do was put this information out and everybody just grabbed right on to it. It has not happened. But, you know, we believe at the Chamber that education is the best approach. If you want to legislate, go ahead, but that’s probably not going to be most effective. What we’re trying to do is educate folks and, Sam, I’ve tried to sort of draw from my life experience. At one point, I was a scout master of Troop 508 in New Berlin, Pennsylvania.
Sam Pearson
I know it well!
Bob Garrett
Yeah, okay [laughing]. As a scout master I was trying to convey to you know, 11, 12, 13-year-old boys what it meant to be in nature and we did something we called “leave no trace,” you know, try to be kind to nature. But one of the things you teach children – it’s at the very core of scouting and of so many programs – is a respect for nature. And, the fact that, what we’ve been trying to get across is, COVID-19 is nature. This is natural. What matters is this is nature. One of my favorite bumper strips that I saw one time is, “nature bats last.” If you take on nature – if you’re stupid enough to take on the natural world, you will lose. And as a person, this is, you know, even though we’re in an area, a rural area where rugged individualism is highly vaulted and highly respected, this is not something that you want to try to muscle your way through. We’ve got to be smart about how we approach COVID-19. At this point, we need to keep those masks on. It doesn’t matter how bright color green it is we need to do all of those safety things and continue to socially distance. You know I heard Joe Kantz on the radio this morning driving up, on WHP 580, the big Harrisburg station. They were interviewing Joe and Joe was talking about some of the public education that they did at the county level, and I thought, you know, now there’s a good example of – they worked on education, they didn’t puff up, they didn’t worry about preaching to their base. They said, listen, let’s try to get through this yellow phase as safely as possible so we can get into the green phase as quickly as possible.
Tonight, we go into the green phase. I am asking, please, continue to wear your mask, continue to social distance, continue to wash your hands – do all those things we’ve done all along. You know, things that feels to me like we learned how to do this in kindergarten, that sometimes when I think about it. Because when you put a mask on that’s not so much about you, it’s about the person that you’re with, it’s about the other person. Take care of each other. Yes, we are rugged individualists in Central Pennsylvania. Yes, we are tough folks but we’re also caring. Show that you care for your neighbor. Show that you care for the person you haven’t met. Show that you care for the person behind you in line. Show that you care for that person on the front line, you know the new front line as we call it, by wearing a mask, washing your hands, covering your coughs, doing all the things you should be doing.
Sam Pearson
That is so great to hear from you, Bob. I really appreciate you emphasizing that messaging and also just emphasizing how this is just what we have to do. It’s not anyone imposing anything on you. It’s just a response to the unfortunate but natural situation we find ourselves in. I think that’s really great framing and really helpful. At the same time, I have to admit, it’s very forward thinking of you and it really does feel like you had an advance sense of how to approach this. How has that meshed or not meshed with the businesses you network with? Initially, what did businesses most need the Chamber’s help with when things first started shutting down in mid-to-late March?
Bob Garrett
Right. Yeah, to me that’s a day that will live in infamy – March 19th. What happened that week, you know, we were working our responsible reentry. We were trying to figure out what are we going to do about our annual meeting? What things are being canceled? What are we going to do? What are we going to do? What are we going to do? You know, if you remember, it was a Thursday, I guess the eighteenth, the governor came on and said, okay, I’m shutting down the state, everybody cover in place, basically, to use an emergency terminology, but he essentially said, stay in your home until we can figure this out. Just give us a couple of days here. We’ll get this figured out and we’ll get back to you, which was, I have to tell you, to me was slightly dumbfounding. Because I was like, wait a second, you mean to tell me we don’t have a plan for something like this? These pandemics happen every 100 years, just like floods happen every 100 years and as we know, 100-year floods happen about, what, about once a decade, it seems like. Why don’t we have a plan? But that doesn’t matter at this point. What matters is that that next morning, I was here by myself because I furloughed all my employees and said, stay home. I knew that I’m in a situation where I could leave my home, get into my car, stay masked the whole time, get here, come into this building, keep the doors locked, work at my office by myself, you know, keep the place sanitized, and at least keep the flag up the flagpole, if you will, here at the Chamber. And Sam, I’m telling you, that day, for me, I had no less than 40 phone calls, probably 300 emails from Chamber members saying, Bob, what is going on?
Sam Pearson
Right.
Bob Garrett
Uh, so I immediately filled out our paperwork and I’ll give the state credit. They responded very well, from my perspective. Now, I know this wasn’t true of all my members. But from my perspective, they responded within 24 hours. You know, I submitted my waiver at 8:45 in the morning and literally, at 11:59 that night, I got approval to stay open. I was getting questions, everything from, you know – a local pallet manufacturer who touched base with me, and said, “Bob, we’re being told to close. You can’t move, you know a pallet full of masks, without a pallet. We have to stay in business. How can you help us?” – to you know people that frankly were less legitimate in their pleas, like, “oh, I have a, I’m over here at the restaurant and we have a group coming, a retirement party coming in today at lunch, what do I tell them?” Tell them they’re not having their retirement lunch today. You can’t do it. Do not do it at this point. And, I honestly had the Pennsylvania Department of Health on my speed dial and I was calling them and I was getting return phone calls, and we even cued up our responsible reentry to them so that they had it, and we were able to refine it as more guidance was coming from the Pennsylvania Department of Health as well as from the CDC. As you recall, in March, this was a moving target. I got to the point where I stopped putting stuff up because I would post something at 3:00pm and by 4:30pm it was wrong.
Sam Pearson
Right.
Bob Garrett
So I stopped putting things up and said, just hold on, right now the best thing to do is stay with your family, continue to practice social distancing, we’ll get this figured out, but we need the weekend and I’ll be back to you on Monday. And by Monday we pretty well had everything in place, and we’ve been working off a game plan ever since that – I guess March 21. And tonight, I intend to be at the barber shop. I’m going to be helping cut the green ribbon at the barber shop at 12:01. Now there’s no hair for me. I have a hopeless head when it comes to barbers, but I’ll be there to help cut the ribbon, and the message I’m going to try to get across to folks is, okay, we’re going light green tonight. In fact, I even have a very light green ribbon tonight. This does not mean we let our guard down. This does not mean we get silly. This does not mean we do anything stupid. We will not truly be green until we have a vaccine that we know that works and that everybody has been vaccinated. Then, we can have the celebration. Tonight is just a momentary pause. We can start to return to something that looks closer to normal, but tonight is not normal.
Sam Pearson
Right. That’s really an important point. We’ve been talking about, you know, going green! What does it mean? Green means go, right? And, it means, not quite. Green right now is, as green as we get, as normal as we get – still within the state of emergency, and that again, that natural emergency is the issue. We have to all be respecting that and being on our guard against it.
I appreciate you sort of giving your timeline and how things rolled out for you at the very beginning. I’m curious, you know, you had emergency conversations, lots of calls from businesses early on, everything was changing. I certainly remember that for the podcast. It was very challenging. We were working on not reacting too quickly on purpose, like, you know, taking in information and sorting through things and trying to get out messaging that would be solid and useful to people. And that has been a challenge over time. Things have changed. We’ve learned more about COVID-19 in the process. I’m wondering, from a business perspective, you know, the initial crises were about who got to stay open, how to apply for aid, the payroll protection program – things like that. How has that shifted over time? What are the key areas of concern for businesses right now, today?
Bob Garrett
Right, right. So, the key thing for listeners to keep in mind is the paycheck protection program, the EIDL loans, all those things – what the federal government was doing was creating liquidity. If the federal government wouldn’t have done what they did and if they don’t continue to do what they’re attempting to do now, we will go into depression. There is no question. We have sucked too much liquid funds out of the economy right now with these closures. What they’re doing is they’re allowing businesses to continue their payrolls, to do some things that are not completely productive, if you will. They have created liquidity and if they wouldn’t have done that we would be in bad, bad, bad shape. We would not be pulling out. We would be talking about a generation, not a quarter or two to pull out of this recession. So that was very important what they did.
What I’m hearing now is, most folks are touching base with me about and what we heard in the economic forecast yesterday. They’re starting to make their short-term plans for the next quarter and they’re starting to put those plans together about, okay – how am I going to reopen? How am I going to bring people back to work? How am I going to make people feel comfortable? How am I going to make my business safe? The worst thing that can happen now is contact tracing is getting pretty sophisticated. If I open my business and somebody comes in here and they get infected – this is hypothetical. If I open my business and somebody comes in here and they get infected, and it’s traced back to my business – ikes! You know, what does that mean to my business? What does that mean to my liability? Those kind of things. So, what I hear my businesses, my members telling me is we’re going to be very cautious of the reenter. They’re going to still be listening very, very closely to people like Kendra Aucker and Jaewon Ryu over at the Geisinger, to Dr. Levine. They’re going to be listening very, very closely to those folks and they’re going to pivot. You’re going to see quick pivots now. We’ve all learned how to pivot. You know, one of the ones that I’m watching most closely because they’re being very, very cautious and very, very careful about their reopening is Knoebels. You know, a lot of people know of Knoebels because of the rollercoasters and all those sort of things, but Knoebels is several different business – they have a lumber business there…
Sam Pearson
Right.
Bob Garrett
…they have a golf course, they have a restaurant, and they have a campground. And watch Knoebels. They are something of the gold standard. And Knoebels understands completely that if they are reckless in their reopening that it could be very, very bad news. They’re going to do this in a smart, intelligent, careful way.
Sam Pearson
That’s, that’s really, I mean, they are really in what’s many ways, Central Pennsylvania. In fact, we interviewed Mike Glazer a couple of weeks ago following the reopen protests in Harrisburg, and his closing was, he really wants to go to Knoebels! [laughing]
Bob Garrett
Oh yeah, me too! [laughing]
Sam Pearson
So, I think it is really important to note that they are – entities like that, businesses like that, your organization – are really being leaders in critical ways and in ways you’re always leaders, but mabey we aren’t all aware of it as much under normal circumstances. Do you feel like people’s awareness of the Chamber has changed in the past few months?
Bob Garrett
Yeah, I think folks have seen how we’ve upped our game, how we’ve provided very high-quality information, how we’ve not stooped down to some of the political brouhaha. We defend the right for people to petition the government for redress of grievances. That’s directly out of the constitution, right? We support that, of course. We support the First Amendment, we support the Fourth Amendment. There’s no question whatsoever. But this is not the time to be ineffective. This is not the time to be reckless. This is nature that we’re dealing with. You know the real head scratcher for me were the people that showed up in Harrisburg with the big semi-automatic weapons and automatic weapons. What are you going to do, shoot coronavirus? That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. And, and, and, let’s be honest, they were protesting to an empty capitol building. I live two blocks from that capitol building. That’s my home there. They were pro… – Harrisburg’s empty. Harrisburg’s a ghost town right now. You know, so, you know, they were there for television coverage. They were there to pump themselves up. And God bless ‘em. I happen to believe they’re wrong. I think there’s effective ways to reopen. I think there’s, you know, I have some misgivings with some of the decisions that have been made by the governor and by his advisors, but I would rather present them with better data. I believe, or I think they had bad data or they were cherry-picking their data in some cases. What I was asking them to do was look at all the data, not just the convenient stuff, all the data, and then let’s make decisions with that. And I think, I think by and large, overwhelmingly, predominantly, whatever word you want to use, they have made good decisions.
Sam Pearson
It has been hard to get people on the same page. Why do you think that is? Why is it so hard to get people on the same page about public health?
Bob Garrett
We’re polarized. You know, one of our strategic initiatives is polarization and we’re trying to bring things together. It just seems like you cannot have a discussion today that doesn’t, doesn’t devolve into politics, into polarization, into name calling and finger pointing. And we’re polarized, and COVID-19 is the latest. And the other thing too is, this is an even numbered year divisible by four. You know what that means – it’s an election year! And Harrisburg back when I was actually a state employee, we used to call this “silly season” because not only is it an election year, a presidential election year, and luckily for us in Pennsylvania it’s not a gubernatorial election year. But it’s a presidential election year, and also we don’t have a U.S. Senate race this year, so it’s not quite as silly as usual, but this is pretty darn silly. It’s also budget time and both of those that we used to call “silly season” – I think everybody’s trying to find the political, advantage, the political, what’s the bent on this? How can I use this to my side’s benefit, etc. And you know, we’ve had a little bit of it right here in the Valley. Of people that are, do I say preaching, speaking, I don’t know what the word would be but they’re playing to their base and you know, I remember, one time, seeing a quote something along the lines of, “a politician worries about the next election, a statesman worries about the next generation.” And we could really use some statesmanship right now and unfortunately, we’re not getting it from all corners.
Sam Pearson
What are your discussions with businesses about masks looking like? How does…how are those conversations going?
Bob Garrett
I’ve tried…I’ve tried to keep the message as simple as I possibly can, Sam. And that, the simple message is wearing a mask is an act of kindness. Wearing a mask is a way of you showing – I care about you. It doesn’t do a darn thing for you. It protects everybody else. Wearing a mask, is just, it’s not, it’s kindness, it’s good science, it makes perfect sense. Not wearing a mask, no matter what excuse you have – rugged individualism, it messes up my hair, I don’t like how I look in a mask – that’s all ridiculous. That argument we heard two decades ago, three decades ago about seatbelts. Wear your seatbelt. Wear your mask. If you’re going to be in public, if you’re going to be around other people, wear your mask. It makes perfect sense and it is truly, at the end of the day, an act of kindness.
If I can, I just want to put a quick ad in, I serve on the board of the Central Susquehanna Opportunities and tomorrow, we’re reopening our Fresh Fruit Farmacy. Fresh Fruit Farmacy is located in Shamokin on Arch Street and we’ll be doing everything we can to make sure that people are getting fresh, nutritious food throughout the Valley.
Julie Hagenbuch
A big thank you to Bob Garrett for speaking with us. If you’d like to send us your thoughts and your questions you can email radiofreelewisburg@gmail.com. Call us at 570-523-0114 and message @lewisburgeighborhoodspage on Facebook. Stay safe out there and be well.
