Exactly two months ago today Juan and I sat in our South Mountain Cafe with the President of the United States of America and talked candidly and openly about the economy and mental health and childcare and the needs of business owners. He told us we are the perfect example of a couple who is trying to do it right. We beamed with pride in that space in that moment that we had created together. We rode that wave of joy for a few days and then our world in Emmaus came falling through the ceiling.
After the President visited, the first contact we received from the Chamber of Commerce (this includes Emmaus Main Street Partners) was to check in to see if we were going to participate in their soup crawl. The next contact we got was a voicemail from our Chamber Rep scolding us for telling the public they were not helping us in the wake of our Upper Macungie troubles. For the record, they were not helping us. To this day they have not commented on the fact that our small business brought the sitting President of the United states to their main street.
We shared our candid thoughts with our Chamber Rep. They apologized for how we reacted to their response. We withdrew our membership. Our landlord erected a massive flagpole in front of the store to hang the Emmaus Main Street Partners sign the following week.
Then the leak happens. We report ourselves to the health department via email and phone. We open an insurance claim. Our insurance will take care of refurbishing the equipment, but the space was built out when we move in. This means, the Landlord is responsible for the repairs, not the tenant. This means our insurance isn't covering the countertop or cabinet replacements.
We ask our landlord that anything not NSF rated in the drip zone is replaced. The health inspector tells us to open, no inspections needed. We watch something happening in the space on the security cameras. We ask what is happening, our landlord ignores us. Ultimately he messages us and says good news everything is fixed. From what we have seen on camera, we know it is not. We ask for documentation. He goes silent again.
Eventually, his lawyer sends us the following reports and the same day, the Health Inspector inspects the place without inviting us.
We know it isn't safe. We know this because having your bike shop staff install new countertops directly on top of old, saturated wooden countertops that have been contaminated with water from the roof is not the right way to solve this problem.
Having CDA Inspection Services create dateless inspection reports is nothing more but a grasp at straws to show you did the absolute bare minimum. Mold tests in the door ways! Awesome. How about the bar top where people actually eat.
The franchise of ServePro you worked with also provided documents with seemingly false information on them regarding run times of equipment and did not providing any documentation or chemical data information about what was sprayed in the kitchen. (MSDS anyone?) At least one dehumidifier and several air movers were unplugged for 12 hours straight on Feb 29. Usage report shows full usage.
To counter, we offer our Engineer's report. This is the type of documentation we would expect from our landlord in a situation like this. Instead, he went silent on us.
We have spent the past three weeks BEGGING for someone to tell us the right way to re-open our business. We want things to be safe, but we are also a small business so we don't have excess dollars lying around to fix things that are not our responsibility to fix. If it's not Nowhere, someone will be opening in that space. You should know what was/ was not done to make it safe.
This is the entirety of what our Motion Sensor Camera captured. Let us know how you feel about this.