Tennessee/Hamilton County reopening

Gov.

Bill Lee announces reopening details in Tennessee & Hamilton County is going along with them.

Now.

In tennessee, governor bill lee announces his first steps to reopen the state economy.

Restaurants will be allowed to resume dine-in services on monday.

Retail stores can reopen on wednesday.

Both restaurants and retails stores will have to limit their capacity to half of what they can normally hold.

Governor lee did say 18 percent of the state's workforce is asking for unemployment, and 800 thousand jobs have been lost.

Mayor jim coppinger says hamilton county and most of the smaller towns will follow the governor's guidelines and dates.

But that means no bars, music venues or even churches yet.

The county is laying down rules that businesses must go by.

Restaurants will be inspected and customers can report violations.

But the mayor says they're trusting the restaurant owners to do the right thing.

See, here's the thing.

And i truly believe this.

We've come along way with the education and awareness piece of this covid virus and what we're saying to the restaurants is we've got enough confidence in you that you're going to adhere to the rules.

I have confidence that the restaurants are going to play by the guidelines.

If they don't we will step in.

One requirement is limiting six people per table.

We've got a breakdown of all the guidelines on our website, wdef dot com.

Signal mountain will wait until monday to decide on reopenings.

And mayor berke continues to steer a different path.

He said today he will release a four phase plan next week similar to the big four task force recommendations for larger cities.

And they will only move to the next phase if the health data supports it.

Mayor berke says he is distraught about the mixed messages, but this is the right course for chattanooga.

The safety of our community, the restarting of our economy go hand in hand.

Those two things are linked.

And people are only going to go to restaurants and to retail establishments if they know that they are safe and feel comfortable doing so.