Elk Grove to launch $4 million grant program to aid small businesses hit by pandemic
Elk Grove will launch a $4 million grant program to help small businesses hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Final approval from city council members came Wednesday with the aid offered to targeted storefront businesses from restaurants, bars and coffee and tea shops to hair and nail salons to daycare centers and small home-based operations.
The 2021 COVID-19 Business Recovery Grant Program is slated to begin as early as October. Businesses in Elk Grove will be able to apply for the grants online at the city’s website, elkgrovecity.org, under Business and Employee Assistance.
“They’re grinding and trying to survive,” Elk Grove City Council member Pat Hume said of the city’s small businesses at the Wednesday meeting. “We’re passing these monies through and trying to help those who’ve been most hit by the economic effects of this pandemic.”
The council’s vote was 4-0. Vice Mayor Stephanie Nguyen was absent.
The $4 million in funding comes from the federal American Rescue Plan — representing nearly one-fifth of the $22 million that Elk Grove was awarded in federal pandemic relief. The city recently received the first allotment of $10.9 million.
Grant amounts vary from a $500 flat rate award to home-based businesses to a maximum of $15,000 for eateries and other target businesses.
Business owners can use the grant funds to cover general business operations, make payroll or pay suppliers; take care of rent, lease or mortgage payments; purchase personal protective equipment or meet the costs of complying with county, state and federal regulations.
A program that rolled out in August through the city’s Economic Development Department is offering as much as $10,000 to help small businesses defray the costs of planning and permits.
Several tweaks including one last-minute change were designed to broaden business owners’ access to the grant assistance.
City staffers said the 2021 program will:
▪ Extend the online application period to 30 days from the one-week window in 2020.
▪ Remove the requirement that businesses not receive other forms of financial aid.
▪ Base grant eligibility on business revenue instead of the number of full-time workers the business employs.
▪ Expand outreach efforts to the city’s small business owners, particularly Black, brown and other minority entrepreneurs.
“The biggest complaint of small business was not knowing (the funding) existed,” Elk Grove Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen said Wednesday, referring to a 2020 grant program.
The late change this year — using business revenue instead of head count to determine eligibility for the grants — came after concerns from a special economic recovery task force of city leaders and the business community that awards determined by numbers of employees “may not be fair to many small business owners,” said Angela Perry, Elk Grove Chamber of Commerce president and a task force co-chair.
Single-owner or family-run businesses where family members aren’t official employees, or businesses that rely on independent contractors, such as salons, would likely be left out of the grant funding, Perry said, calling the revenue model more inclusive with the “best positive impact on the business community.”
Elk Grove awarded some $437,500 in grants to 111 small businesses over two rounds of funding in 2020, according to Elk Grove Economic Development officials — 58% of the $750,000 available for the program that year.
Now with more money available in this year’s round, the grant program’s challenge remains outreach, said one local small business leader.
Salena Pryor, president of the Black Small Business Association of California, works largely with microbusinesses — single-person operations and those with a handful of employees — many hard hit by the ongoing pandemic. Pryor supports the program and said Wednesday the Elk Grove program “will go a long way in helping our small business owners.”
Elk Grove officials have planned a wide-ranging information effort including email blasts and social media posts, direct messaging and mailing campaigns, assists from local business organizations and reminders at city meetings.
That follows the creation of a special recovery task force of city officials and those in the business community to get feedback from local entrepreneurs.
But Pryor said those efforts could miss the mark if they don’t reach Black and other underrepresented business owners directly.
“A lot of times when they’re thinking about outreach, they don’t think about it in a way that reaches people,” she said.
Pryor said the vast majority of Black-owned businesses are microbusinesses. Few are affiliated with or pay into business networking associations where they can connect to information and ways to access financial help. Others aren’t necessarily linked into social media networks.
That monetary help and access to aid “needs to be targeted to people it needs to reach,” Pryor said. “We have to go where the people are so they can get the information.”
This story was originally published September 10, 2021 at 2:50 PM.
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