12 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • NOVEMBER 2020
COVER FEATURE
NASSAU WORKS OVERTIME TO EASE
The coronavirus pandemic has shaken
Long Island’s economy to its core.
With every aspect of daily life paused
by restrictions to stop the spread of
COVID-19, local merchants have been
left wondering when, if ever, business
as usual would return.
Nassau County Executive Laura Curran
hosted daily briefings, virtual Town
Halls, launched Public Service Announcements
and set up webpages to get
up-to-the-minute updates. Curran and
her administration set up an SMS message
service, available in six languages,
so that notifications could be pushed out
and information could be seamlessly
relayed to the people who needed it most.
After several painstaking months of
shutdowns and the gradual fall of confirmed
cases on Long Island, the region
was permitted to begin reopening. In
stages, carefully attempting to avoid
any further outbreak, sectors of the
economy reopened with new guidelines,
restrictions, and regulations to
keep people safe. In fact, the normal
we returned to has seemed anything
but, as those new safety precautions
took shape.
Business owners shouldered the burden
of abiding by these new safety procedures
while also producing the goods
and services needed by Nassau County’s
1.3 million residents. Many small business
owners, already dealing with a cash
crunch from months without commerce,
were forced to spend hundreds, if not
thousands, of dollars to reinvent their
operating procedures, buy personal protective
equipment (PPE), hire new staff
for cleaning — all the while operating
at a fraction of their previous capacity.
Many were contemplating closing their
doors for good without some assistance
from government.
“Immediately following our front-line
response, my top priority was understanding
the impact of this crisis on our
small and large businesses and those
who provide our residents with essential
services,” said Curran. “I made it my
business to get back to business safely
and to get our downtown communities
bustling again.”
She took immediate action, and Nassau
became the state’s first county to create a
Coronavirus Economic Advisory Council
to track the losses of the business
community and identify, in real time,
their needs. Represented on the council
were some of the region’s top business
and nonprofit leaders who provided
input on an ongoing basis.
It became clear that businesses were
concerned about three things during
the reopening stages: access to financial
resources if needed, consumer
confidence, and the ability to afford
PPE to achieve that level of consumer
confidence.
“With this challenge before my administration,
I charged my economic
development team with developing
programs and resources to support
businesses’ specific needs as they navigated
through these uncharted waters,”
Curran continued.
Curran’s deputy for economic development,
Evlyn Tsimis, oversaw the
distribution of a special allocation of federal
HUD funding under the community
development block grant program, intended
to support hard-hit regions. The
county’s team worked with the Nassau
Industrial Development Agency (IDA),
and Nassau’s Local Economic Assistance
Corporation (LEAC) to establish a campaign
called Boost Nassau to aid Nassau’s
L. to R.: Nassau IDA CEO Harry Coghlan, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran, Nassau ICA Chairman Richard Kessel,
and Evlyn Tsimis, deputy county executive for economic development. (Photo by Tab Hauser)
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
