HERMISTON — A customer’s next lunch tab could be paid for, courtesy of the city of Hermiston.

At a Monday, May 10, meeting, the Hermiston City Council unanimously voted 6-0 to direct city staff to work with the Greater Hermiston Chamber of Commerce on developing the Restaurant Assistance Pilot Program, or RAPP.

Inspired by a similar initiative the city did with Hermiston Cinema and the Desert Lanes bowling alley over the summer, the program would use $50,000 from the latest COVID-19 federal relief package to create gift certificates redeemable at Hermiston restaurants.

Assistant City Manager Mark Morgan said the city still needed to finalize the details with the chamber, but staff wanted to get the program funded before the end of the fiscal year in June.

According to a draft outline of the plan, Hermiston would distribute $10 gift cards to city residents through their utility accounts, the chamber, Hermiston Parks and Recreation and the Hermiston Public Library. Participating restaurants would accept the gift cards as payment, and then turn in the cards to the chamber for reimbursement. The program is expected to run through the end of the year.

Councilor Nancy Peterson asked if the city was planning on tracking purchases made by the gift card to determine whether the program was effective, while Mayor Dave Drotzmann asked if recipients could make some sort of cash match before acquiring the gift cards.

“They won’t just get a free cheeseburger,” he said. “They have a little skin in the game.”

Chamber CEO Kristina Olivas said the goal was to keep the program as simple as possible to ensure wide participation from the city’s restaurants, whether they were chamber members or not.

Olivias said the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the local restaurant industry have been uneven — many of Hermiston’s most popular restaurants were able to use increased revenue from drive-thru and delivery to make up for the shutdown to indoor dining, while the smaller “mom and pop” restaurants were trying to figure out how to stay open.

Councilor Roy Barron was concerned about equity, saying a number of smaller restaurants, particularly Latino-owned restaurants, were neither members of the chamber or the Hermiston Latino Business Network and typically struggled with gaining access to assistance programs.

Olivas said she was aware of the issue and would work toward marketing the pilot program to the Latino business community. But she also added that the chamber and city wouldn’t be able to dictate which participating restaurants consumers spent their gift cards at.

Morgan said governments sometimes suffered from “paralysis by analysis,” and the city would be able to use the response from the pilot program to inform how they approach future assistance programs.

“We’ll learn a lot just by rolling it out,” he said.

The council ultimately voted 6-0 to authorize the program. Councilor Phillip Spicerkuhn recused himself from the vote because he’s a member of the chamber board, while Councilor Lori Davis was absent.

Earlier in the meeting, the council unanimously voted to enter into an intergovernmental agreement with Umatilla, Stanfield, Echo and Umatilla County to contract with Pac/West Communications to provide government affairs services.

Hermiston already contracts with Pac/West to represent its interests in Salem, but the new agreement would involve all the entities using Pac/West to “closely work together in seeking projects that strengthen the West County area.”