April 3, 2024
The Honorable Mayor Dyer and City Council Members
Fresno City Hall
2600 Fresno Street
Fresno, CA 93721
RE: Opposition to Proposed Restaurant Mandate- New Costs & Training ID 24370 BILL (for introduction) - Adding Article 35 to Chapter 9 of the Fresno Municipal Code, Relating to Naloxone
Dear Mayor Dyer and Council Members:
The California Restaurant Association (CRA) is the definitive voice of the food service community in California representing over 22,000 food service establishments. Restaurants are highly regulated businesses which, in a good economic climate, operate on very thin economic margins, yet provide among the highest state and local sales tax revenue that communities rely so much on for essential services.
Our CRA Fresno Chapter is a robust and very active collection of restaurant and hospitality employers.
Unfortunately, those same employers are now being targeted for a new City mandate directed specifically at restaurants, yet we have had no outreach and have seen no data to suggest this proposal is addressing a real public policy issue within restaurants.
The issue of fentanyl use is real and is a crisis in many of our communities. While this is true for the larger community, we have seen no concerning data indicating that fentanyl use (and overdose) occurs in restaurants.
In fact, the ink is barely dry on a new state law (SB 234, Portantino, 2023) which now requires stadiums, concert venues, and amusement parks to maintain unexpired doses of naloxone hydrochloride (or any other opioid antagonist) on its premises to address cases of overdose.
During the policymaking process for SB 234, restaurants were not deemed to be an appropriate setting for such a mandate. The City of Fresno is considering going in the opposite direction and to our knowledge, with no data to indicate why this is so.
The proposed mandate from the City will require purchasing and maintaining an opioid antagonist and training staff on the proper usage. All of this comes at an additional cost for local restaurants, including the training time.
Local restaurants are currently trying to manage new costs already imposed by the state (SB 478, 2023) for other employer financed training as of this year. This shift took what was a modest employee expense for food safety training and moved that onto the employer to pay- - which when compounded across the employee base for the industry will be a massive costs shift and will take time to settle out.
Again, with no outreach for discussion with our restaurant community, no compelling data to justify targeting restaurants, and a new state law that addresses this larger issue of fentanyl overdose by focusing on larger public gathering spaces- we feel this proposal before you is misguided.
Perhaps a different approach could be considered- one that focusses on education and awareness for employers and the public- rather than targeting an industry that has been battered the last many years and yet continuously provides financial support to the community and local government services.
For these and other reasons, we are opposed to the proposed mandate on restaurants and would welcome the opportunity to discuss it further.
Sincerely,
Matt Sutton
Senior Vice President, Government Affairs and Public Policy California Restaurant Association