LOCALITIES GIVING GRANTS TO HELP SMALL BUSINESSES

Peninsula-area localities worried that small businesses struggling to cope with the coronavirus are offering help with paying rent and mortgage bills.

Gloucester County is offering grants of up to $2,500 a month for past due rent and mortgage bills, among other purposes. Hampton’s City Council authorized forgivable loans of up to $10,000, which can be used for rent, mortgage payments — or even payroll expenses that other grant programs do not usually cover. Isle of Wight County, Smithfield and Windsor offer a limited number of one-time grants of up to $2,000 to cover indirect costs incurred because of the pandemic.

Peninsula cities and Gloucester are among the small number of Virginia localities offering help specifically aimed at preventing business evictions.

“Some of the calls we get are just heart-rending, when you hear from people worried they’ll be evicted or lose their business,” said Lewis Lawrence, executive director of the Middle Peninsula Planning District Commission, which is coordinating an effort by counties and towns there to use some of their federal coronavirus relief funds to help local businesses deal with virusrelated costs.

“Main Street businesses are falling through the cracks,” said Virginia Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne. “If I was a local official, I’d be doing this, too — they’re really dependent on sales taxes and meals taxes for revenue.”

He said he’s working on a program that would steer some of the state’s own CARES Act funds to help small businesses.

“Since day one of this pandemic, it has been our goal to do what we can to help keep our businesses afloat,” said Sherry Spring, the county’s economic development director.

Gloucester’s board of supervisors has allocated $512,000 of its $3.3 million of federal CARES Act funds to help local businesses.

The idea of using the CARES Act funds to help businesses is still new — Lawrence said the state association of planning district officials has asked him to speak to its summer conference about the Middle Peninsula initiative. Fairfax County, which received $200 million directly from the federal government, has approved a $25 million grant program to help businesses and nonprofit agencies.

Of the other Middle Peninsula localities participating in the business grants program, Mathews and King and Queen counties are each setting aside $100,000; Middlesex and the town of Urbanna, $247,477; Essex County and the town of Tappahannock, $100,000; and West Point, $33,000.