LONG BEACH, California: Vivian Hurtado and Mica Randall tried to stay out.
It had been two months since Los Angeles County banned food on the spot to stop a historic increase in coronavirus hospitalizations. But the couple — Hurtado, an assistant to a veterinarian, Randall, a contractor — knew that the trendy restaurant just behind their apartment continued to accommodate customers in the backyard. They thought Restauration was just doing what it had to do.
Dana Tanner, owner and outwardly charming face of the site, has stated that keeping her yard open is a matter of survival for her workers. But like so many rogue coronaviruses over the past year, it also seemed to embrace the notoriety involved in defying public health orders in the midst of a pandemic. Before New Year’s Eve, when Los Angeles County’s ICU capacity was 0 percent, Restauration announced a face-to-face dinner in its backyard, and then doubled down when a local news organization asked about this.
The Long Beach City Health Department ordered the restaurant to close a week later for violating coronavirus regulations. Shortly afterwards, Tanner invited restaurant owners and journalists to return to her courtyard, for a meeting in which she urged others to follow her. “It’s wrong for us to be locked up and discriminated against,” Tanner told other business owners in an interview with The Daily Beast.
Finally, on Jan. 23, city utility workers showed up at noon on Saturday and turned off the restaurant’s gas. But if it was a genuine attempt to end Tanner’s traps, it was unsuccessful, rather than launching an increasingly bizarre chain of events showing how California companies are writing their own safety rules. public during COVID-19. crisis.
That Saturday evening, Hurtado and Randall, unaware that Restauration had lost gas in the early hours of the day, were watching TV at home, they recalled. They could feel a kind of work being done outside the living room window, which is above the gas meters in their building. Then, suddenly, they heard a loud, high-pitched noise, like the sound of a gas escaping from a pipe, they told The Daily Beast in separate interviews.
An overwhelming smell of gas filled his apartment and Hurtado sent Randall outside to see what was going on, they said.
There, Randall met Tanner and an unidentified man. “Oh, it’s me, Dana,” Randall recalled. “He almost has a cap.”
Randall imagined it was just routine maintenance and communicated it to his wife. They tried to ventilate the apartment.
It wasn’t until the next day that they checked the news and realized that Restauration’s public service had been shut down.
Tanner now faces charges for unauthorized gas line that city workers found on the property the next day, when gas workers, police and firefighters appeared after receiving reports of a presumed filtration. Tanner is accused of manipulating the gas lines, allowing the construction of an unauthorized gas line and the operation of a restaurant without the required sanitary permit, in addition to the charges he faces for serving customers in the courtyard. He has no lawyer yet, but a criminal lawyer handling the case will attend his lawsuit on Feb. 19, he said in an interview.
“The manipulation of the gas line significantly raised this case. It was something that put the health and safety of residents at risk and we felt there was no choice but to take action, ”Long Beach City Attorney Doug Haubert said in an email.
Tanner denies that he manipulated the gas pipe, suggesting that someone installed the new one without knowing it. Pressed to learn more about what happened that night, Tanner said he was only showing a friend what the city had done. The friend then started “playing” with the gas line, Tanner said.
“He would tell me,‘ Yeah, we don’t. ’And then I left,” Tanner told The Daily Beast.
“That gas line opened,” he acknowledged. “I did not do it. He would say to me, “No, it’s not okay.”
The friend closed the line, Tanner said, and they both left for home. He blamed an unidentified third party for later installing a line that connected another apartment tenant’s gas meter to his business without his knowledge.
“Did I go out to look at what the city had done? Absolutely. It was my gas and they took it illegally. I was avid about it, “Tanner said.” But did I change it? No, and did it change that night? Absolutely not. “
“I went back there with a police officer,” he added. “And I personally didn’t smell like gas.”
As for keeping the yard open during the coronavirus surge, Tanner was not at all alone when it comes to pandemic resistance nationwide, and particularly in Southern California. The region has hosted flash mobs of anti-masks looting malls, a singer and a Christian rock anti-mask unleashed his fans in the non-slip row, Kirk Cameron at the head of a group of anti-mask and anti-cowboy carols that closed the inoculation at Dodger Stadium. A restaurant owner in nearby Huntington Beach went viral late last year to ban any customer or employee from wearing masks, arguing they are “a symbol of control and surrender.”
Business business groups have waged their own campaigns against COVID standards in the state. The California Restaurant Association has claimed that less than 5 percent of cases come from meals outside the home and more than a dozen restaurants sued Gov. Gavin Newsom for restrictions.
But Tanner sets out to run a lengthy challenge campaign that has upset local authorities.
On Thursday afternoon, Restauration was open for business, although it no longer had a sanitary permit or gas. Currently, the courtyard can accommodate 36 people and is full most nights, according to Lucas Meyer, who works there as a server. Several couples left or waited to sit during a 20-minute visit to The Daily Beast. A sign in the backyard warned everyone of the “government or law enforcement” that they were not welcome. The staff cooked and cleaned with an electric iron, an electric fryer and an electric water heater.
“A lot of those places that have been closed will never come back. But I’m still able to make money and support myself. So I’m very grateful for that,” Meyer said.
For her part, Tanner insists she is not anti-masking or pandemic-denying on her own, even when the city prosecutor assumed the authorities found no application of masks or social distancing when they cited the restaurant last month on the patio dining room. Tanner said he has kept the yard open to a reduced capacity (which previously had 85 people), according to guidelines published by Los Angeles County before the pandemic.
His rhetoric sometimes drags himself into denialist territory.
“The danger, the subsistence of our residents, to me, has a higher mortality rate than this virus does and to whom it is affecting,” he said about the pandemic restrictions. “And I’m not saying it’s not real, but what about these twenty-year-olds and my kids and the rest of the house businesses?”
Last year, Tanner received a $ 71,600 PPP loan under the CARES Act, the Long Beach Post reported. He said the money only covered what the restaurant lost during the first three months of the pandemic, when they agreed to go only to eat according to the above guidelines. But his ongoing legal battle could pose his own financial challenge: Tanner currently faces 21 felony charges and up to $ 52,000 in fines.
Earlier this month, he filed a lawsuit against Long Beach and its health department, alleging that its gas was illegally shut down, that there is no “reliable data” linking the spread of COVID-19 to the restaurants of the restaurant and asking for their permission. to return. He filed the petition with the help of a civil lawyer and declined to say how much he paid for his services.
He acknowledged that the legal struggle could end up being more expensive than it would have been to go for it. “It could be. But it’s the beginning of the issue,” he said.
It is true that there is limited data on the dangers of eating outdoors, but the absence of data does not mean it is safe. “When you go to a restaurant, you tend to be very close to people you haven’t been close to, and that usually is for longer periods of time,” two factors that could spread the infection easily, Dr. Timothy noted. Brewer, epidemiologist at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
Outdoor dining is once again allowed in Los Angeles County after the Newsom government eased restrictions late last month. Of course, Restoration never closed. That fact is not lost on the local authorities, but they don’t seem to know how to hold Tanner accountable.
“It was a bit unusual that once the gas was turned off, the business would continue to operate,” the city’s deputy prosecutor, Art Sanchez, said in an interview, adding that inspectors were unable to enter because Tanner “has been denying ability to enter and inspect “. (“That’s when we were summoned,” he replied in a text message. “Since the warrant was lifted, I have not allowed access.”)
Sanchez noted that a civil order to force an inspection was still a possibility, but also that Tanner could return his health permit if the civil lawsuit is successful. The city has also warned Restauration owners that they could eventually be held accountable.
“It’s a unique situation, but we’re doing what we can under these kinds of parameters,” Sanchez said.
Hurtado, the neighbor who lives in the apartment next door, said she initially did not complain that Restauration left her yard open because of the plight of many small business owners. But after the gas incident, he is no longer silent. .
“He really crossed the line,” Hurtado said. “I can’t stand this anymore when it involved innocent people who really had nothing to do with it.”