To: All Coastal Team Members

Fr: Paul Doyle

Re: Coronavirus 19 Update

Date: 3-31-2020

This is more of a personal note, not a business plan. I want to report what we know, what we are thinking, what we are working on and what our evolving plans are relative to the COVID challenge. 

It becomes more and more clear every day that COVID is a real challenge from a medical perspective. People are getting sick and some are dying.  To this point, we still have no report of any Coastal employee testing positive for the disease.  People’s health is our first priority and we build all our plans starting with this consideration.   Beyond that, we have business demands and government regulations to learn, and then there is the challenging matter of a $2 trillion security and stimulus package that we are working to understand.  There are still more questions than answers.  Questions like: How bad is this?  How long will it last?  How will this affect our business?  As soon as there are answers, we are passing them along to all of you.  The following list describes the thinking and planning we currently have in place.

  1. We support the federal and state initiatives to shut operations down and keep people away from one another.
  2. We also recognize that people in our communities will be at risk if they do not have access to certain life sustaining goods and services.
  3. We will remain open for business that is in support of life sustaining activities. When we are asked, we will require certification of this need from the officers of the companies who ask this of us.  When our team members are asked to work, we will do all we can to accommodate their concerns and support the cleanliness and distancing requirements.
  4. We have asked everyone to make a sacrifice in their work and / or income.  Most team members are laid off and those who need to work have all taken a reduction in compensation. This is a huge issue and it hits some much harder than others. We are doing this to ensure there is a strong business for us all to come back to once the doors are reopened and the economy starts back up.
  5. We are watching forecast models and doing all we can to anticipate when we will be in a secure position to return to full pay and general employment. The parts of this that we don’t control are the overall economy and the government regulations.  Again, please know we are looking at this every day and will do all we can to communicate the health of the company and our plans for return to operations.
  6. While we are down and people are not receiving pay, we are doing all we can to set up Coastal so that our team members qualify for as much of the employment stimulus as possible.  Several team members are studying this every day. We meet twice a day and review what has been learned on this front. What we  do know will be pushed out to you all through the Human Resources team and our general communications methods.

I am sharing all this with you so that you know how we are thinking about things, what our views are, and what we know and don’t know.  If you have questions please let HR know and they will forward all the questions to the leadership teams and we will get you answers.

Paul