Seattle City Wire

Two Seattle-area men who make their living in the now largely idled parking and driving industry, a manager and a maintenance worker, have different views of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I have yet to feel much impact personally," Premier Parking Seattle operations manager Jeffrey Rentner said in a statement to Seattle City Wire. "However, being a single father, I am extremely worried about the likelihood of me taking a pay reduction or being let go due to the situation at hand."

That has already happened to maintenance worker Kurt Davis, who has been furloughed. He told Seattle City Wire that he isn't sure how he will pay his bills "if unemployment doesn't come through" or how he'll feed himself without a steady income.

"More than anything, I would most definitely like to see the experts find a vaccine for this virus," he said.

The observations of Rentner and Davis are repeated much further up the company ladder. Last week Premier Parking COO William Clay called for more help to his industry that has been hard hit by the economic freefall wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The phase III stimulus package, which included extended unemployment benefits, passed by the U.S. House and Senate last month, likely will help most of Premier Parking's furloughed employees, such as Davis.

But Premier Parking also is struggling against an uncertain future, Clay said.

"We are asking that the parking industry [NAICS 812930] be recognized as an industry in need of assistance, and we are asking for business interruption insurance to be granted to our company [and others like us] in this time of great need," Clay told Tennessee Business Daily.

Premier Parking employs more than 2,000 associates in more than 600 locations in more than 40 cities across the nation, providing services at concerts, sports and other events.

Those events now are postponed or canceled, drying up Premier Parking's business as the company's customers are largely stuck at home waiting out the crisis. That lead to the furlough of hundreds of Premier Parking's employees.

"[The coronavirus] has caused devastation to our company and to our family of employees as we've been forced to lay off hundreds of employees over the past two weeks," Clay was quoted in a Tennessee Business Daily last week. "This has been the most difficult two weeks of my professional life. Revenues are down 90-plus percent across the board as most CBDs are shelter-in-place and employees are working from home."

The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was starkly illustrated earlier last week when the U.S. Labor Department reported that a record-breaking 6.6 million workers signed up for unemployment benefits.

The suddenness of the crisis is a large part of what has made the COVID-19 pandemic so difficult to comprehend.

"It's hard to imagine being in this seat a month ago and underwriting big lease deals and acquisitions, to being the same seat today with an entire public that no longer needs our company’s services," Clay told Tennessee Business Daily. "It happened seemingly overnight."

The majority of Premier Parking's workforce are in field operations, including valet drivers at hotels, also shut down by the crisis, and shuttle bus drivers for hotel employees who also have been largely furloughed.

"Through no fault of their own, their lives have been turned upside down, Clay said. "They lost a steady job with a reliable paycheck and are facing repercussions that may seem insurmountable for many.”

About 80 percent of the Premier Parking team in Seattle were furloughed, Rentner said.

"The hardest thing was knowing that these members all live paycheck to paycheck trying to get by," he said. "When I go home at night, I often stay up wondering if the decisions we were forced to make were the correct ones."

Rentner was able to keep only five team members in his office employed.

"Knowing that I had to internally cause hardship for many families kills me," he said.

Davis said he hopes government will step in and that he retains hope for the future.

"The government can help by speeding up the process to get money to companies like Premier Parking to give it a jump start so we can get back to work," he said. "I just want to say to anyone who reads this to keep in mind that even though this is a totally different kind of bug, this too shall pass."