File photo Mary Rivard, owner of the Color Cafe Hair Salon in New London, is suing Gov. Sununu for issuing orders that forced her business to stay closed for an extended time.

NEW LONDON – Like many small business owners across the state forced to remain shuttered under Gov. Chris Sununu’s State of Emergency declaration, Mary Rivard has gone from looking forward to the day she can return her popular hair salon to business as usual to worrying that newly-imposed guidelines will slash her revenue to the point she’ll have to call it quits.

Faced with that prospect, Rivard, whose shop, Color Cafe Hair Salon, has been closed since Sununu’s first State of Emergency declaration on March 27, is taking Sununu to court, asserting that the state no longer has “an emergency that justifies the continued shutdown of its businesses,” according to her lawyer, Attorney Robert Fojo.

According to the suit, which Fojo filed last week in Merrimack County Superior Court in Concord, Rivard is seeking “injunctive relief,” meaning she is asking the court to issue an emergency order lifting the shutdown so she can reopen immediately.

She is also seeking a “declaratory judgment” on her position that Sununu’s orders “exceed statutory emergency powers,” and asks the judge to find that the orders “continue to violate” her Constitutional rights.

Rivard is also seeking damages “for losses to her business stemming from these orders,” according to the suit.

Judge Richard McNamara on Friday ordered a hearing be scheduled on the suit “at the court’s early convenience.”

While Sununu’s original shutdown orders in March were considered necessary to “slow the spread of the coronavirus,” also known as COVID-19, and prevent the state’s healthcare system from becoming “overwhelmed,” Fojo argues that the state never came close to reaching capacity.

Sununu passed that good news on during his press conferences, citing state Department of Health and Human Services reports that the “hospitalization rate was dropping.

“In other words,” Fojo wrote in the suit, “New Hampshire’s curve had ‘flattened,’ and had never really spiked at all. Emergency measures that appeared to be Constitutionally appropriate in March are less appropriate now, given the wealth of information available” regarding the pandemic’s impact on New Hampshire.

Still, Sununu continued extending the State of Emergency, “even though New Hampshire’s curve was ‘flat,'” Fojo wrote. The most recent order extends “the shutdown of ‘non-essential’ businesses through May 31,” and although the order “allows certain businesses, such as Ms. Rivard’s hair salon, to reopen – but only if they follow strict, arbitrary guidelines that make it virtually impossible to operate realistically, or at a profit,” he wrote.

Now, nearly two months “into this lockdown … many ‘non-essential’ businesses have been closed for a month and a half, and no end is in sight despite there being no ’emergency’ in New Hampshire,” the suit states.

“Ms. Rivard is facing the real possibility of closing her business permanently.”

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Dean Shalhoup may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.