The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently shared a list of preventative practices for communities of faith as they begin to reopen their doors. This list highlights the following ways to plan, prepare and take action to stop the spread of COVID-19:

• Ensure your building’s emergency operations plan is updated in accordance with the latest recommendations of your nearest public health department.
• Create an emergency communication plan that will enable your staff to communicate the latest information regarding your facility’s operations to congregants.
• Make a plan for how to protect congregants and staff who are most vulnerable of contracting COVID-19.
• Stay up-to-date about your local community’s COVID-19 situation and information.
• Appoint a staff member to be the point of contact for all COVID-19-related matters in your faith community. This staff member should be contacted if a congregant becomes ill or has direct contact with another individual with COVID-19. Furthermore, this point of contact should notify local health officials if congregants are exposed to COVID-19.
• Establish a separate space for individuals who are sick, and properly disinfect the area afterwards.
• Promote frequent handwashing, social distancing, cloth face coverings for applicable groups, covering coughs and sneezes and staying home when sick.
• Keep personal protective equipment (PPE) in stock for congregants, including hand sanitizer, no-touch trash cans, tissues and cloth face coverings.
• Remain cognizant of these additional COVID-19 preventative actions. 

For further COVID-19 guidance as your faith facility reopens, I encourage you to check out the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) list of best practices for community and faith-based leaders.

Are you a small or medium-sized business owner? I am pleased to share that the Federal Reserve recently started accepting lender registrations for their Main Street Lending Program (MSLP), which was created to support small and medium-sized businesses that have experienced economic hardship as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The MSLP will provide eligible businesses with liquidity from the Federal Reserve’s various financial institutions to help them stay afloat. Eligible borrowers include American businesses with no more than 15,000 employees and less than $5 billion in annual revenues in 2019. If you qualified for and received funds from the Paycheck Protection Program, you may also be eligible for MSLP loans.

If you are an eligible business owner in need, I hope you’ll take advantage of this program that will allow businesses throughout Wisconsin to not only recover economically, but prosper going forth.

This week, the House passed H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. As I've said many times in my newsletters, the name of a bill does not reflect the content and oftentimes a bill with a nice-sounding title is named as such to distract from what is actually inside of it. That is what happened this week and, regrettably, House Democrats ignored this opportunity to make real change and used it to pass a bill filled with provisions that would make the entire police force, including the good officers, which is the vast majority, less effective and more liable to frivolous lawsuits. 

While it is my sincere belief that state and local governments should take action to terminate officers who are repeatedly misbehaving, the vast majority of cops are good and do a great job protecting our communities. That is not to say that there aren't unscrupulous police officers. A better way to approach police reform would be as I did during my time as a State Senator in Madison, where I introduced a bill that would have made it easier for police departments to terminate officers for misconduct. Sadly, that bill was not passed.

I did not vote for H.R. 7120, and have urged Nancy Pelosi and House leadership to consider commonsense legislation that would allow police departments to terminate officers for misconduct without punishing good officers with one-size-fits-all regulations. I thank Wisconsin’s police forces and the brave men and women who put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe.