This past Friday, Orange County government announced a change to its state of emergency order, mandating that restaurants stop serving dine-in customers after 10 p.m. each night.

The order cited several restaurants in the county remaining open to the early morning hours and serving primarily alcohol instead of food as a reason for the change.

97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck spoke with Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger about how this measure can help the county avoid hotspots and how some Chapel Hill businesses played a part in stirring this change.

Hemminger said, before the change of this emergency order, the town had noticed that people were congregating in restaurants after they had stopped serving food.

“So, we’ve asked restaurants to stop serving food indoors – you can still do takeout and takeaway – at 10 p.m.,” Hemminger said. “We’ve asked them to stop serving so that we can get people not to be congregating in a bar-like setting.”

She said a couple of downtown Chapel Hill establishments, classified as “student hangouts,” were observed to be operating as a bar even though there is still a state-wide mandate for bars to remain closed.

Hemminger said the town recognizes that social and physical distancing is hard – especially among college-aged groups.

“We get it,” Hemminger said. “We know that people want to be together. We hate this because socialization is a huge part of our life, but we need them not to be having a couple hundred people inside a restaurant that is no longer serving food.”

You can hear more of this conversation with Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger in our Conversations with the Mayors Podcast, located here.

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