Kristin Ropp, general manager and vice president of the Heritage Bank Center, said that three months ago she assumed the facility would be open by now.
“When we closed down in March, I didn’t even pack my office,” she said. “I just took my laptop home. I thought we’d have monster trucks in April.”
Ropp said their industry is both the hardest hit initially and the final frontier when it comes to reopening.
“It just depends on when the government is OK with thousands of strangers in one place,” she said. “I applaud Gov. (Mike) DeWine for creating subcommittees to work on this like he did with the restaurants. They’re reopened now. People are really craving entertainment right now, so our position is, ‘hurry up and wait.’”
Unlike a summer venue such as Riverbend, this is the indoor Heritage Bank Center’s off-season. Ropp had to furlough many employees. There’s a skeleton operations crew keeping an eye on the building, though department managers are still working on their fiscal-year budgets.
“We’re busy rerouting,” she said. “When one tour changes, they all change. It’s a domino effect. We’re also even more active on social media, just to remind people we’re still relevant and topical. Musicians are really chomping at the bit to get out there, too.”
Rosemarie Moehring, director of marketing and public relations for Music and Event Management, which promotes shows at Riverbend, PNC Pavilion, Taft Theatre, and the Rose Music Center, said officials there were monitoring the situation.
Ropp said the biggest challenge to reopening is managing social distancing. Several ideas have been entertained and discarded.
“We tabled the idea of calling limited amounts of people through certain gates at certain times …,” she said. “We’re talking about limited capacity and keeping people spread out, but some people might rush to the front anyway.
“We’ve talked about limiting the number of people in the bathrooms, but that’s hard to do. What does eating look like? The other issue is how this virus keeps evolving. I can’t keep up with all the recommendations in a 24-hours news cycle, like, ‘What am I supposed to do today?’ We’re not there yet, sadly.”
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