Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett announced the launch of the Milwaukee Business Restart Program to help the local small businesses weather the current crisis through a system of grants. The program is geared towards helping the local economy reopen after nearly two months of statewide quarantine with grants that could be up to $15,000 per business.
“The goal is to get businesses back up and running. The idea is to return people to employment. To keep vitality in neighborhood businesses and to allow business owners to get over the hump of restarting a business. At this juncture, we want to make sure that businesses have every opportunity to survive,” said Jeff Fleming, spokesperson for the Department of City Development.
This announcement comes after the state Supreme Court struck down Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home order in a 4-to-3 ruling. While the state is already open, some areas, including Milwaukee, are choosing to keep a full or partial stay-at-home order in place. As Milwaukee businesses are still closed or slowly reopening, the ones that need help to reposition themselves as the economy reopens will soon be able to apply for support from the city.
Who Is Eligible?
“What the program would allocate would be funding that would assist businesses in modifications to their business”, explained Natanael Martinez, Commercial Corridor Manager
for the City of Milwaukee. “Some examples that we've already seen is grocery stores that have been using Plexiglas to create screening between employees and customers to [impede] the spread of the virus. But it could also be helping smaller businesses needing assistance getting an electronic payment system or online payment to help them minimize cash transactions. So, it's really taking an innovative approach to figuring out what are some of the ways that businesses can retool and prepare themselves for the month ahead.” Other possible uses for the grant money would be to restock perishable inventory, for instance ingredients for restaurants.
Only businesses with 20 or fewer employees and with revenues of less than $2 million are eligible for grants. “By putting a size limit on this program, we're making it clear that this is a program intended for our small, neighborhood businesses, because we want to make sure that they can come out of this pandemic as well,” Barrett explained. The Business Restart Program was thought up to complement national opportunities for grants and loans which are available to larger companies. “Many small businesses have not been able to get access to the funds that they need, so our priority in putting this program together is to help small businesses who are trying to get back on their feet in ways that we believe do not duplicate programs that are now in place at the federal level,” the mayor added.
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Applications for grants will be available starting Thursday, May 28, and will end Friday, June 12. On May 28, businesses will be able to apply at milwaukee.gov/restart. The Department of City Development announced in a press release that grants would start being distributed “as soon as possible after June 12.” All applications submitted during the two-weeks period will be considered equally, regardless of the day when they were submitted.
“The application should be a relatively simple process in which applicants will be asked to describe their needs, and how specifically they would use the money,” said Fleming. “There are questions about other aid that they may have received. They'll be asked about the extent to which they have already incurred losses. There will be a variety of questions, but it won't take hours to fill out the form.”
For How Much?
The restart program will be exclusively funded by the $103 million that Milwaukee received through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The exact amount is not set in stone, but the Department of City Development estimates that “as much as $20 million” could be dedicated to the program. It will be essentially dedicated to businesses that already had costs related to coronavirus-related measures or will have such costs in the near future.
It is unclear how much money each applicant can hope to receive, but the mayor suggested that grants could be “perhaps up to $15,000” for each business to directly cover coronavirus-related costs. This money would not have to be repaid.
“We are going to have a two-week period when the businesses come in, then we will get a sense of how much money we have available,” Barrett clarified. “That’s in sharp contrast with what happened at the federal level, where they announced the amount that they were going to allocate, and it was a first-come, first-served basis. We don't think that first-come, first-served is necessarily fair, because we know that a lot of these businesses are mom-and-pop businesses or small businesses; they don’t have attorneys, they don’t have accountants and business advisors.”
The City of Milwaukee’s restart program comes concurrently with a similar initiative on the state level. On Monday, May 18, Gov. Evers announced that he would be dedicating $75 million in grants to help Wisconsin’s small businesses get back on their feet. “But Milwaukee’s program involves potentially larger grants than the state program, so the two programs are a little bit different in scale,” Fleming adds. The state only offers $2,500 per business, up to six times less than Milwaukee’s initiative.
The city’s restart program will be rolled out in cooperation with the Milwaukee Economic Development Corporation, which will lend its expertise with loan programs.
“We’re very excited that we’re able to use some of this money that's intended to deal with the fallout of COVID-19 in a way that's going to help us get back to normal,” the mayor concluded.
