One year ago, on March 16, 2020, Governor Tim Walz announced executive order 20-05, which closed bars, restaurants, theaters, fitness centers, and other places of public accommodation and amusement at 5 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day. That was the first of many orders regarding COVID-19 restrictions and closures that have impacted businesses across the state, including in the Crookston community.
On Friday, Walz announced a loosening of those restrictions, which began on Monday, including an increase in capacity for bars and restaurants to 75 percent, fitness centers and pools to 50 percent, and theaters to 50 percent. Irishman’s Shanty owner Paul Gregg said it will be nice to be open later for St. Patrick’s Day this year. “For our catering, it’s nice for brides to know they can have a larger group now,” said Gregg. “For right at the restaurant, we were at 50 percent; now it went up to 75 percent. That helps too. It’s going in the right direction, and people are feeling a little more comfortable with the vaccinations. What are we at 20 percent right now of the population of Minnesota has been vaccinated, and it’s going up each and every day? We’ve been fortunate to be open all the way through this either we went just to takeout or had some dine-in. St. Patrick’s Day is coming up in a few days, and this year we’re looking forward to being open until 11 p.m. where last year we were closed by 5 p.m.”
Laurie Stahlecker, owner of Crookston Inn and Scobey’s Pub & Grub, said they started getting calls for booking weddings right after Walz’s announcement. “Our bar can now open up to 75 percent, which is great news,” said Stahlecker. “I was really hoping to see the time limit go up at least an hour, but it didn’t, which is fine. We can open up our banquets more. Weddings we can do up to 250 people. Right after he spoke, we got four phone calls for people to book banquets. So, we’re really excited.”
Crookston Eagles Manager Jake Fee said the loosening of restrictions will help in the renovated banquet hall, which was completed last year. “It’s definitely good news for our banquet hall side,” said Fee. “Now we can go up to 75 percent capacity, but still limited to 250 on that side. For the most part, it was a minor bump up as far as capacity goes for our events and weekends, but as we head into wedding season, that’s welcome news. As far as how we operate our bar side, nothing really changes as far as that goes. Social distancing and everything really won’t let us go over on that. It’s a minor difference, but any increase we can have for weddings and other banquets is definitely a thing we’re hopeful will continue to loosen up.”
Over at Snap Fitness, Brandon Kresl said getting back to 50 percent capacity opens the facility up to handle its usual peak occupancy. “Right now, at the 25 percent, we were limited to a capacity of 21 people,” said Kresl. “Now we’re going to be bumped up to 42. That will get us almost to our normal (occupancy). Except for a few things like wearing masks and everything else, we’ll be a lot closer to normal now. That’s also going to increase a little of what our group fitness can do. Hopefully, we can get all those back up and running. As of right now, we’re still planning to do all of our indoor stuff, getting our senior program going. I got some word that it looks like that will start within the next month, they are just waiting on a couple of clearances, and our senior program should be starting very soon.”
Bo Brorby at the Grand Theatre said it’s perfect timing with some of the bigger titles of 2021 set to start debuting toward the end of the month. “We were pretty happy to see that,” said Brorby. “Right now, we haven’t been running into the 25 percent occupancy issue, but with some bigger movies coming out, it’s going to be very good for us. We’ve had some issue with the 25 percent with private rentals because we can’t have more than 50 people in a private rental right now. We have the new Godzilla movie premiering on March 31, so we made the joke that we think the governor was wanting to see the premiere of Godzilla in theaters. We can have a little over 100 people in the theatre at once.”
