Advocacy matters now more than ever

March 24, 2020

by Chris Romer

Now more than ever

As business leaders dedicated to economic vitality of the Vail Valley, Vail Valley Partnership focuses on issues that impact our trade region, our communities, our businesses, and our citizens. Our advocacy efforts have long been to advance issues and rely on local government to carry out their roles for good, public policy. We represent YOUR interests with government.

Now more than ever, our business community needs advocates to speak on your behalf.

We have been actively advocating for our business community with our federal, state, and local elected officials on a variety of economic recovery programs to support you, our local businesses:

  • Business Interruption Insurance: lobbying state and federal elected officials to ensure Civic Authority is the cause of business closure
  • Unemployment Insurance: lobbying federal officials to not have unemployment insurance premiums (paid by the employer via payroll taxes) increase as a result of layoffs due to COVID-19.
  • Health insurance exchange: re-opened through April 3
  • SBA Disaster Loans: passed March 19
  • Sales tax deferrals & other tax payment deferral programs

We are leading or participating in a number of economic recovery coalitions to ensure business needs are met in upcoming efforts.

We continue to work closely with the towns, county, and other groups including the Small Business Development Center, US Chamber of Commerce, Governor’s office and Workforce Center (Department of Local Affairs) to collect as many resources and as much information as possible to keep our business community appraised of the various tools available during this uncertain time.

As such, we have been actively leading efforts to provide business tools, resources, and information to the business community, including:

While our physical office is closed, our entire staff is working remote; we are maintaining complete operations to support our community and our members with business support, outreach, information, communications, and most importantly, advocacy. We know it is hard and encourage you to only lay people off for now so they can get unemployment. As soon as the stimulus passes and funds are disbursed you’ll be able to hire them back. This is NOT going to put you out of business. We won’t let it.