Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, visited the Lehigh Valley on May 5 as part of the Biden Administration’s “Getting America Back on Track” tour.
The Second Gentleman toured the Bridgeworks Enterprise Center, a small business manufacturing incubator in Allentown hosted by the Allentown Economic Development Corporation. Emhoff spoke with mead makers, pharmaceutical heads, and restaurant owners about their struggles in the pandemic.
“You’ve had long-term family restaurants that have been there 20 years and they’ve had to close and let all the employees go and give all the food away,” Emhoff says, “A party planning business that literally shut down and all the employees were women and they couldn’t really come back to work and teach their kids online school,” Emhoff says.
At a round table with local business owners on the impact of the American Rescue Plan’s relief efforts, he highlighted the Biden Administration’s recent job and family plans.
“You can’t just come in and fix all these issues related to the pandemic and then just stop. Things were actually really bad before the pandemic. They just got worse,” Emhoff says.
Administration officials like Emhoff are traveling across the county to promote President Biden’s $4 trillion infrastructure investment plan.
“We need clean air, we need clean water to drink, we need safe travel,” Emhoff says, “We need to do all that in an economic but environmentally safe way and it all means jobs.”
Emhoff was joined by officials from the Small Business Administration and Lehigh Valley Congresswoman Susan Wild (D-Lehigh) who also supports the plan.
“My community, this community, we need these businesses here going forward and the only way they are going to make it to the other side is with the help of the government,” Wild says.
Emhoff said this was his 12th trip across the U.S to speak to small business owners since President Biden took office. In October, just before the 2020 election, he campaigned for Biden in Allentown. Some of the other stops on the “Getting America Back on Track” tour are also in 2022 battleground states like Pennsylvania.
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