With Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley ex­pect­ed to make pro­nounce­ments on phase three of the COVID-19 re­open­ing plan on Sat­ur­day, the Bar Own­ers and Op­er­a­tors As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go is call­ing on him to al­low bars to re­sume op­er­a­tions in phase four.

“We just want to be able to op­er­ate and if phase four can for­ward that will work very nice­ly for us,” BOATT pres­i­dent Teron Mo­han said Fri­day.

With bars closed since March 21, Mo­han said bar own­ers are suf­fer­ing im­mense­ly with the clo­sures, with at least three of his mem­bers hav­ing to put their stools up for good.

“No salaries are be­ing earned. Even to date, some em­ploy­ees have not been able to ben­e­fit from the grants. Then, there are the less for­tu­nate bar own­ers, who are ten­ants, they are not able to meet their rent,” Mo­han said.

De­scrib­ing the sit­u­a­tion bar own­ers are fac­ing as very del­i­cate, he in­sist­ed that mem­bers are in a po­si­tion to take the nec­es­sary mea­sures to lim­it the chance of the spread of COVID-19. He said mem­bers, num­ber­ing around 150 in to­tal, have been do­ing their due dili­gence.

“We’ve been re­search­ing cer­tain poli­cies from al­most every sin­gle health body glob­al­ly, from the world health or­ga­ni­za­tion right down to the OS­HA con­sul­tants lo­cal­ly,” Mo­han, the own­er of Darin’s Sports Bar in Diego Mar­tin said.

He said bars had been out of busi­ness for too long, adding they don’t want hand­outs from the Gov­ern­ment but sim­ply want to get back to work. He’s cer­tain own­ers know what they have to do when the time comes to re­open.

How­ev­er, he said the as­so­ci­a­tion would like more in­for­ma­tion on when their re­open­ing date will be so that they can plan ac­cord­ing­ly.

“We will arrange some­thing with re­gards to the seat­ing. We will space out the seat­ing. We are al­so will­ing to op­er­ate with a cer­tain time frame as well,” Mo­han said.

When asked how op­er­a­tors plan to con­trol pa­trons, es­pe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing that many will be un­der the in­flu­ence, he said their ap­proach won’t be much dif­fer­ent from their cur­rent ap­proach.

“It’s noth­ing much dif­fer­ent to what we will con­tin­ue to do. If the pa­tron acts a bit slop­py, we will do what we have to do,” he said.

“Our mem­bers are ful­ly ca­pa­ble of man­ag­ing their pa­tron­age. We are ful­ly aware of what is at risk.”

Ac­cord­ing to a 2017 Gov­ern­ment es­ti­mate, there are at least 5,000 bars across the coun­try. The Bar Own­ers and Op­er­a­tors As­so­ci­a­tion es­ti­mates that the clo­sure of bars have fi­nan­cial­ly af­fect­ed, di­rect­ly and in­di­rect­ly, close to 100,000 peo­ple.