Id tv in detroit. A typical april sees michigan as ready to burst, but april 2020 brings us a really empty abandoned buteel remain at odds with the pace that is going on in many hospitals. And for the healthcare care workers, putting their own lives on the line every day to save the lives of others. As expected, missionary michigans governor expanded her stayathome order. Public Health Experts agree, but others wonder if the Small Business owners devastated by this crisis will recover, and those seeking help by the government too many times here this. Your call cannot be completed. Questions remain. Governmentral targeting the help in the right places, and if the curve is flattening, how do we begin to emerge from a long, dark night of covid19 . Tonight, we renew the team effort to fox 2 news, 7 action news, and local 4 come up with our two senators, Debbie Stabenow and gary peters come across the state of michigan, it is a live senators town hall. Good evening and welcome to tonights town hall. This is the second in a unique partnership of which i know we are all proud to be taking part could i am Carolyn Clifford from 7 action news, along with my andeagues from fox 2 news local 4. It is a pleasure to be with you tonight. I know we have received questions from viewers all over michigan. We sure did, carolyn. We are delighted to have with us to michigan members of the United States senate, senator darius seven out senator Debbie Stabenow and senator gary peters. There is no doubt that we are joined by two democrat senators, and our goal is to steer clear of politics. We are going to try come up with the goal to give michiganders the answers they want on this unprecedented crisis, a crisis that has taken so many lives as of today, we have lost more than 2000 michiganders to covid19, and sadly, they wont be the last. In addition, so many other people have lost their jobs, their income, their faith in the future, all of us wondering what is ahead. With us now live from their homes, senator stabenow in lansing and senator peters. We are about to get started. This is a question for both of you, beginning with senator stabenow. President s plan to open parts of the country in phases. What is your reaction . Sen. Stabenow i have seen a little bit. I would like to see more. What i heard as he talked about testing, which is so important, and about the governors making their own decisions within those states. What i would say is to reemphasize what you just said, inlost over 2000 people michigan, moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas, friends and neighbors, and we have to make whatever decisions are made as a country and as a state, based on the medical experts to keep ourselves safe. We all want to keep the economy going again. We did not wanted to stop. We do not wanted to stop. But we have got to focus on the medical experts and the testing, and i will finally say that, you know, eventually a vaccine is going to give us all the confidence to be able to go back and live our lives and have a vaccination and continue with what we have been doing in our lives. But between now and then, it is about testing. We need to have the kind of the mayor of detroit has been able to do with a 50minute habit test for police officers. You take a test in the morning, you get the results immediately. You know you are ok, and then you can go to work. I have been very involved in that. There is a report of my website. I released a report yesterday about where we are in the United States compared to the world, where we need to go, what we need to do. So i am hopeful that the president and others, that we will all work together. We have republican colleagues now that are talking about testing as well. This is about working together to get people back to work, and i would just close by saying t my favorite tshirt is its everybody against covid19, and i think that is the way we have to live it. Goal isor peters, the to ease restrictions in areas where there are fewer infections, but the whole is hardhit. What do you think . Will it work . Sen. Peters well, i think we have to be very careful about moving forward. Certainly we want to get back to a normal. I think it will be a no normal. It is going to take some time for us to gradually reopen. I think it is absolutely essential that we do this from expert advice from epidemiologists and our public Health Experts that can tell us the way to move forward but to do it in a fashion that protects people. We know that this disease is very, very contagious, and it can spread very, very rapidly. And one thing that we have known is that it is really critical to make sure that you stay ahead of it, which is why having some very strict restrictions right now is just so important, that people stayathome and try to take only those necessary trips out, so we can slow down the progress of covid19. It is critical for us to make sure that we have hospital capacity, so this disease is not get ahead of us, and folks forced into the hospital, and then the hospitals run out of bed then run out of ventilators andventilators, you are going to see death rate increase medically. You monitor it. You look at whether or not you are flattening the curve. When you are doing that, you believe you have sufficient hospital capacity, should there be a resurgence, you can start slowly but surely opening up businesses. I agree with senator stabenow that testing is absolutely critical. You have to know who is sick and who is not sick. That is one of the problems we have right now. We simply did not have that kind of robust testing early on, early this year. Other countries were able to do much more robust testing. Those countries that did that are in a better situation now than we are. Some are starting to move toward opening up their economies. There is also a cautionary note from singapore and hong kong, that had success doing that. They are now starting to open up some of their businesses, and they are seeing some resurgence. This is a very delicate line, a delicate balance that we would have to move forward. In addition to testing, you have to make sure you have protection all Protection Equipment. Still do not have enough personal Protection Equipment for people. We are still struggling in michigan to get that equipment for our medical personnel. Im the Ranking Member on the Senate Homeland security committee. I oversee fema. Im on the telephone every day to someone from fema, including the director, to make sure we are getting those critical supplies. We have to ramp through as we go. I think you will see strict social distancing, illnesses that are limited as to who can be in that business. Going to take constant monitoring. It is going to be a delicate balance. And it has to be driven by Public Safety and the expert advice we get from those folks from the Public Health area. Thank you both. Carolyn . Carolyn all right, senators. Thank you so much for being here tonight. This question is for both of you. Stimulusa 2 trillion package, people have starting started getting their checks. But many viewers wanted to ask both of you, why did you initially vote against the stemless package when so many people needed it, and are we going to see a second round of stimulus money . Senator stabenow, lets start with you. Sen. Stabenow first, i would say the entire process from start to finish in the senate took only five days, to do this huge, over 2 trillion package. The first vote senator mcconnell started to do was to do a vote before we had the bipartisan support to get this done. The original bill that he put forward did not in any way have the Health Care Money we needed. It did not even come close to addressing what doctors and nurses and hospitals need, and what we need to get the testing and the vaccines. I knew we could do better. We did do better. We had to address number one, the health care pandemic. If we are closing businesses, we need people to have income, which is another piece unemployment, Small Business checks, these things come together to try to help with what is a very difficult time, when people are being asked to stay home and do their part. That is the reason i did not support the original plan. It was not good for us in michigan. The second thing is we will have another package. We are in the process of negotiating this right now. This is a health care pandemic. If we are going to go back to work, if we are going to be safe and our families are going to be safe and confident, and workers will feel confident going back we have to i believe make it very clear that for the doctors and nurses and everybody on the front lines that we are not only grateful, but that we are giving them what they need. Art of what we are making as priority for the next round is something senator pierce and i have both been involved in, senator peters and i have both been involved in. The idea of hazard pay, a heroes fund for the doctors, nurses, mail carriers, Grocery Store clerks, people working lawenforcement, and the delivery people, and so on, it is wonderful to say thank you. It is wonderful to say prayers. Them wholemake financially, themselves and their families. That is a priority for us in this next round. Thank you so much, senator stabenow. Senator peters, do you want to theh in or talk about heroes fund . Is. Peters i think it critically important that we move to additional need. When we passed the cares act, it provided over 2 trillion in aid to our hospitals, to working families, to Small Businesses. Get ated to step back and sense of where we are and find those gaps and fill those gaps with additional support. One area i feel passionate about his men and women who are truly our heroes, the folks on the front lines that have to go to work every day. So many of us can be at home, shelterinplace. Kitchen work from our tables online and be able to continue online. They have to show up to work and continue to get a paycheck. That job is essential for our economy as well. Think of those necessary jobs. We need doctors and nurses. The janitors. Difficult forry the hospital to operate. I think the folks working in our Grocery Stores for us to have the ability to stay home, we need to be able to go to the Grocery Store to get food in order to live. They are stocking the shelves, doing the work, interfacing with the public, and putting them risk. And the families at , the busit driver ifs these folks do you are interfacing with the public and putting yourself and your family at risk, you should be entitled to additional pay. We are looking at paying 13 an hour over above what the individual might be making above the regular job, getting 13 extra, cap at 25,000, turning from when this pandemic started to the end of the year. To not only think those individuals who are putting themselves in harms way for necessary and critical jobs, we need to make sure they get compensated for it. Heroes indeed. They deserve every penny. Sam, im going to send it over to you. Sam one of the most frequently asked questions has come in over the last couple of hours today. They say it is unconscionable that the senate did not refill the stimulus fun. They ran out of money today. I move into this trepidation sleep. People have not mention politics in their emails. Only that they are about to lose employees because the senate failed to come through. Stabenow it is an important question. On glad you asked it. This is an important program. It is a strong Bipartisan Program that we have put 350 billion in two. As with anything that moves quickly, we knew there would be some glitches. We have heard from Restaurant Owners that have not been able to access the fund, people in rural areas, farmers who have had trouble because they use farm credit, and it was not initially recognized as part of the Banking System for the loans. Have those in neighborhoods, minority business owners, who are what they call under banked, or not connected to a big bank. I want to make sure that every kind of business, whether you are rural, small neighborhood, a momandpop operation, downtown in one of our small towns, in a microbrewery or bakery or restaurant or coffee shop we have a few things to fix. Im confident we will be able to get that done. We need to make sure that everybody in michigan is being supported with this. Im going to stay on stimulus as we go to senator peters. A different version of the question, talking about different approaches. The United States has decided to approach this from filling up the unemployment side of this, from creating a more robust unemployment program. Other countries, notably in europe, decided they were giving the money instead to businesses, under the promise they would keep their employees on the job. They are trying to freeze their economies in place, so they can simply restart the economy. This is going to mean rehiring, getting people reacquainted and reinstalled with their benefits. I wonder if we are doing this the right way. Are differenthere approaches. You are right about that. I think part of the approach we are taking is we used existing structures so we could move this as quickly as possible, to make sure people could get money. It is a system that is a system that is in place and can move quickly. Right now, though systems are overloaded, but generally speaking it was something we could get moving as quickly as possible. I know that folks who suddenly find themselves unemployed were in serious financial trouble. If you are in serious financial trouble, we wanted to get folks money as quickly as possible. The pandemic assistance act, from is actually modeled my legislation which expands eligibility to unemployment beyond the traditional folks that normally get unemployment, so you have Small Business owners who can file for unemployment. You have folks in the gig economy, independent contractors, people who would not normally get on unemployment, but needed a paycheck as quickly as possible. Nationalodel used for disasters. My working homeland security, overseeing fema, on a hurricane comes in, the unemployment system can step up fairly quickly to get money into peoples pockets, because they are suddenly unemployed. That happens when we have hurricanes. Now, we have a hurricane sweeping the whole country. That is why the unclaimed system is so important. That is what we make sure that in addition to whatever the state pays, there is an additional payment of 600 per week provided to folks. It is important as we restarted. Have the paycheck Protection Plan with the Small Business administration you were just talking about. We have to keep our Small Businesses and business. You cannot restart an economy very quickly if we find our Small Businesses out of business. They are the engine of growth. They are the folks that employ most of the people in the country. We needed to protect them. That is why we used the loans from the Small Business administration. An existingy framework. We just put more money into it. Haveso thought that if you local banks, community banks, credit unions, folks actually processing applications, you would be able to get it into the hands of Small Businesses quicker than try to set up a new system. These are existing systems. They may not be perfect to be wee to ramp up to the volume are dealing with. Without we could get money into the hands of people a lot quicker. They have been overlooked overwhelmed. We will see if they can catch up. This pandemic is not only killing people. It is putting the financial help health of many hospitals in jeopardy. A clear and is cutting the hours of its doctors and nurses. Itsmont is shutting down hospital. Ou if you are willing to bail out boeing, what are you doing for the Health Care System that is in trouble right now . Sen. Peters in the cares act, we provided roughly 150 billion of support for our Health Care Providers. Im on the phone regularly with providers and have been talking to administrators over these past few weeks. What we are facing is a crisis with our Health Care System, a financial crisis that they are very concerned about, and they should be, given the fact that they are now moving away from the normal kinds of procedures that they do in these hospitals that pay a lot of the bills, and really transitioning into dealing with covid19. That puts them in a precarious and ital situation really makes it dangerous for them when they come out of it, whether or not they are going to survive. We need to put money in. As we are dealing with additional legislation, we need to make sure Small Businesses have more money. You have to do everything we can to make sure Small Businesses are healthy. He also have to make sure our Health Care Providers and hospitals have the resources they need to not just get through this crisis, but to be able to emerge from this crisis stronger and healthy. Money is, the way the being provided, it is not enough. And our rural hospitals are going to be in a particularly difficult situation. They dont have the resources that some of our urban hospitals have. They are right on the edge. They could fall out without existing resources from the federal government. We are talking about how important it is to get money into the hands of Small Businesses as quickly as possible. We have to add to that list are hospitals and Health Facilities to make sure they get through this. To provide thee kind of health care we have in our state. It is frightening to think we are letting of Health Care Workers at a time when this pandemic is ravaging the state. Sen. Stabenow it does not make sense. We have a