The sign in front of Sage American Grill and Oyster Bar promises a Sept. 9 reopening after an Irene-caused shutdown.
“It’s like a gas station” posting higher prices day after day, manager and head waiter Bruce Mazy said of the sign. “We’ll put up the 10th, the 11th, the 13th. It’s going to be a while.”
Now that the lights are back on and the debris has been carted away, Irene-ravaged New Haven businesses such as the South Water Street restaurant are into the next and perhaps more critical phase — figuring out how to pay for the damage done and the business lost.
Laurel Leff Photo
It’s a complicated process that involves both private insurance and government reimbursements. Local businesses are just at the beginning stage.
DeStefano inspecting damage.
To speed the process along, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Mayor John DeStefano brought the local head of the federal Small Business Administration to Sage Tuesday morning to observe the damage and discuss compensation.
Dave McCoart, pictured, who runs the restaurant in a building owned by the next-door Pequonnock Yacht Club, said he suffered over $100,000 in damages, maybe $125,000 if lost business is included.
McCoart has run the restaurant for 37 years and has never been closed due to storm damage before. “We were built for the 100-year flood,” he said.
DeLauro on the deck that’s being rebuilt.
The restaurant’s windows had all been boarded up during the storm. Nonetheless, a window broke, sending a torrent of water into the dining room. All the carpeting and the ceiling have to be replaced. The outdoor deck, an important part of the restaurant’s warm-weather business, was also destroyed.
The power outage that lasted six days added to the costs. Peering into a walk-in cooler empty of everything except a few boxes of beer — “at least the beer is still good,” one employee called out — McCoart said he had lost $10,000 worth of food, including six cases of oysters and six cases of clams. Knowing that the storm would destroy their beds and that the shellfish would then be hard to get, he stocked up.
“How smart was that?” McCoart said.
Every day the restaurant is shut is also another day of lost revenues, particularly at the end of the season. McCoart said he has parties scheduled for Saturday and a large Yale event on Sept. 24 involving professors visiting from England. He’s already had to move the events inside due to the disappeared deck. Now he’s just hoping he can pull them off at all.
It also may take time for customers to know the restaurant is open again. “That’s why I say ‘under repair,’ never closed,” McCoart said. “If you say closed, all people see is the word ‘closed.’”
The yacht club, which bought the building that houses the restaurant from McCoart a year ago, is responsible for damage to the building, as well as the damage to the club’s docks. The yacht club’s Bob Ventrilio estimated damage at over $1 million. Private insurance will cover much of it except for “a very high deductible” of $50,000.
Insurance also won’t cover its losses from flooding, such as the restaurant’s deck. Nor will the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides insurance for flood damage.
“We just found out FEMA will not pay for anything outside the wall of the building, and it won’t cover the deductible,” Ventrilio said.
“When the FEMA adjuster got here and I go to show him the deck, he said the deck isn’t covered,” Ventrilio told Rep. DeLauro.
Bernard Sweeney, the SBA’s district director in Connecticut, said his agency could provide a loan for the uninsured portion of the yacht club’s losses. One of the agency’s goals is to “get business going as soon as possible,” Sweeney said. Sweeney said he doesn’t know how many businesses and homeowners will seek his agency’s help, but it will likely be in the thousands.
That means it will even pay for damage covered by insurance and then have the insurance company reimburse the agency. “We can pay you faster,” Sweeney said.
That may be so, but dealing with the government bureaucracy can still be daunting. “Have you ever filled out a SBA form?” McCoart said. “It’s about as thick as that stack of tile over there. I should have had Bernie fill one out.”
Ventrilio said he had just started dealing with the government agencies, but that DeLauro’s support would be “key.”
“She’s been very, very good,” he said.
So has the city’s building department, whose inspectors came quickly and have been there often, giving McCoart and Ventrilio guidance on how to do the repairs in compliance with city law.
McCoart has another concern.
“I feel bad about employees,” he said. “‘I’ve got 40 of them. I don’t have the money to pay them. I told them to file for unemployment for the week.”
A few employees were helping to clean up Tuesday. Eduardo Ortega, who usually works on the cook line, was scrubbing dishes.
“Right now everybody’s doing what we can to clean out the place and get us back in business,” Ortega said.