Their remoteness hasn't spared them from the economic fallout of the shutdown. And the sparsity of COVID-19 cases in this Northern California county has only made the restrictive measures hobbling their livelihoods all the more exasperating.
In the old mining towns that helped birth this state, the bonanzas could be counted on every summer in recent years — not in the extraction of ore, but in tourism, festivals and destination weddings.
But people here are torn — restaurateurs, campground owners, hotel managers, gym operators, tattoo artists and wedding photographers. They know that if California opens up, the virus will come to their communities. If it doesn’t, financial ruin will. “The asks are different for different people,” Thiem said. “I feel like the policymakers are Bay Area-centric, where they say, ‘Just go work from home.’ You know most of our economy here cannot be done from home. So to say, ‘Go work from home because you’re safer’ is different than to say, ‘You need to shut down and bankrupt your business.’”
He first leased the ground floor of the 150-year-old building in November 2018. It was once a jail, and its brick walls are a foot and a half thick. Three restaurants had operated there over the years, with a tiny kitchen in need of remodeling. Lior Rahmanian, chef-owner of One 11 Kitchen & Bar in Nevada City, shows a stack of bills he is ready to mail out.“One of my produce companies, they froze my account because I couldn’t pay my bill. So I’ve been paying them $100 here, $200 here,” he said.
But he will have to close and file for bankruptcy without help of some sort, whether it be his landlord cutting his rent or the government offering assistance that isn’t just a loan that he’ll have to dig out of later. “I was getting dozens of calls from people who wanted to know why we weren’t following Sutter and Yuba counties,” said Porter.
“Parents said, ‘Thank you for doing this. Our kids are driving us crazy. They need to get some exercise,’” she said. “Everybody knows it’s not a hoax. It’s clearly a real virus. There is no doubt that it is scary and it is dangerous and people are dying from it,” she said. But with no new cases in Nevada County since April, “there is absolutely no reason for our county to be locked down.”Farther down the foothills in Penn Valley, Melanie and Andrew Mishler, who run a wedding photography business, at first disagreed about the virus.
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