Nearly 10K Pennsylvania businesses apply for closure waivers

The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development has been inundated with waiver requests from businesses looking to remain open despite Gov. Tom Wolf’s order for all non-life-sustaining businesses to close their physical locations.

As of midday Sunday, the state had received nearly 10,000 waiver requests, according to the DCED.

“We’ve gone through over half of them, and we anticipate continuing to do these as they come in,” said DCED Secretary Dennis Davin.

Davin said a team of about 50 DCED employees is reviewing the requests as they come in and hopes to make determinations on as many of them as possible before enforcement of Wolf’s order is scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. Monday.

Approved waivers will be sent directly to the businesses that applied for them, as well as law enforcement agencies, Davin said. They won’t be listed on the DCED website.

Wolf announced the closure order, which includes potential criminal charges and other punitive measures for noncompliant businesses, on Thursday. He said the order was needed to help limit the spread of covid-19 and ensure hospitals aren’t overrun by patients suffering from the illness.

The department expected to begin issuing waivers sometime Sunday, Davin said.

On Saturday, some businesses that were originally deemed non-life-sustaining were allowed to remain open after officials updated their list.

The DCED has worked with different industries, organizations, chambers of commerce, trade organizations and federal officials to determine which businesses would be considered life-sustaining.

“The first order of business with this is the health and safety of all Pennsylvanians. That is our first job and that is the first thing that we are concerned about, to try to eliminate people from coming into contact with each other as much as possible,” Davin said. “The idea was to put together a list as quickly as we could. We did that.

“After a number of discussions and further reviews of a number of different businesses and the types of businesses that we were getting in as we were reaching out to chambers of commerce and a variety of other organizations, the governor made the decision to amend that list, and that’s the list that’s available right now.”

The DCED has a list of Frequently Asked Questions on its website (dced.pa.gov), as well as an updated list of businesses that are allowed to remain open and which must close their physical operations.