Enforcing Mask Mandates at Events

One new question Convene asked in this month’s Recovery Dashboard Survey — asking when organizers are making the go/no go decision about in-person events in 2021 — elicited this open-ended response from a planner: “We are past go/no go. We are only contracting meetings in Republican states. … As long as the state allows us in, we are there.”

But not every group shares this planner’s political bent. The lack of a statewide mask mandate in the Republican state of Texas has led to the cancellation of at least four in-person conferences that had been scheduled for Austin, according to a recent Texas Tribune article. “These were rooms that were already on the books, and largely what we saw was fallout, ironically, from the governor opening the economy,” Hilton Austin’s general manager, Joe Bolash, said during a March 16 Austin Convention Enterprises board meeting. (Austin Convention Enterprises is the city-owned entity that owns and manages the hotel.) “It was groups that were not comfortable returning to a fully opened economy,” he said, “where there was no mask mandate in place.”