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With strawberry-picking season less than two months away, Anson Tebbetts, the secretary of Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, worked with the state Health Department, NOFA, and other groups to come up with outlines for the way this traditional activity will look under the new rules imposed by Covid-19.
Tebbetts is on a committee developing the guidelines behind the opening of every sector of business, including manufacturing, construction, retail and personal services like massage and salons. The guidelines inform Gov. Phil Scott’s actions in “opening the spigot,” or easing restrictions on business activity – announcements the governor hopes to make every week as the number of Covid-19 infections continues to drop.
The Restart Vermont group, part of the Economic Mitigation and Recovery Task Force, has gotten hundreds of messages from people in business who want to help create guidelines, said Ted Brady, the deputy secretary of the Agency for Commerce and Community Development.
“We are being inundated by people from every sector looking for a chance to participate in helping us reopen,” said Brady. He said it’s particularly helpful to talk to industry experts in areas like health care and personal services, such as massage and barbers and salons.
“People have to touch you to provide services; those are really complex things,” he said. “The idea is reaching out to those people, and asking for their feedback on how the sector should open.”
That’s how the governor arrived at his decision, announced April 17, to let some construction activity commence again, said Brady. Scott said crews of one to two people, working at least 6 feet apart, could get back to work. On April 24, Scott extended that guidance, announcing that the state would allow companies to restart work with five employees at a time, as long as the workers followed safety guidelines, like keeping their distance from one another and wearing masks.
The job of the Restart Vermont group is to set the minimum standards by which people can go back to work, primarily based on safety practices aimed at keeping workers and customers from being infected by the Covid-19 virus. The group uses recommendations from the state Department of Health and from industry sectors to create plans that are submitted to Scott to inform his decisions.
Brady said that clear, understandable guidance that is easy to follow are most likely to be successful.
“The No. 1 factor in compliance is simplicity,” he said.
The group has worked out those rules for farmers markets, which the governor has said can reopen on May 1. It’s also looking at pick-your-own operations, which start with strawberries in mid-June and then move on to things like blueberries and raspberries, and rules for garden businesses, which on April 24 Scott said could open, with no more than 10 people, including customers and staff, inside at a time.
“How do we navigate that so people get starters for their gardens?” said Tebbetts, noting that those businesses are traditionally hopping with activity by Mother’s Day, which this year is May 10. “We’ve reached out to people who run greenhouses and businesses like that to say, ‘What do you think would work?’”
While agricultural businesses were classified as “essential” and largely allowed to remain open under the business closures Scott started imposing in March, construction activity was forced to cease in March.
The Associated General Contractors worked with the Restart Vermont committee on guidance that informed the governor’s decision to ease the restrictions April 17, said Brady. Among other things, the plan requires each worksite to have a Covid-19 safety officer, for which the AGC has created a certification program.
“The AGC was the first that came to us with one of these plans, and we’ve modeled the process based on their plan,” Brady said, adding that he had watched a solar panel installation start back up Monday on his street. “The industry is obviously pining to get back to work safely.”
Breaking large groups of people into teams that consistently work together can help prevent disruptions, said Matt Musgrave, the group’s director of government relations.
“We’re suggesting we not go back to business as usual with a large group, where you have 40 people showing up at the same time,” said Musgrave. Instead, the AGC has come up with a plan for staggered shifts of smaller groups that remain separate from other groups throughout the project.
“You have eight five-person groups out there, not cross-contaminating each other,” said Musgrave. “So if someone gets sick, you send the five-person crew home, not all 40.”
