Lifeline for entertainment
Operators urged to prepare now for new SBA grants to save live music and cinemas
Mornings for Edwin Cabaniss, owner of three Texas music venues including the Heights Theater, used to be a whirlwind of settling up, auditing the previous week’s 12 to 15 shows and pushing out the next week’s dozen, a juggling act that required upward of a hundred emails and phone calls a day and hours spent driving between cities.
These days are much quieter. The Heights Theater shut down completely from March until November. It had no shows in January and has two booked for February; those shows will each only sell a quarter of the usual number of tickets to ensure distance between audience pods. On weekday mornings, Cabaniss makes coffee and checks the Small Business Administration’s website on his iPad, looking for news about the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant.
Part of what was originally called the Save Our Stages bill, the $15 billion Shuttered Venue Operators program will offer grants of up to $10 million to live venue operators, theatrical producers, cinemas, promoters, talent representatives and others that meet the SBA’s criteria. The money, meant for payroll, rent and utilities, among other business expenses, represents a lifeline for the particularly hard hit music and performance industries. And though the SBA is still hammering out the details of the program, Tim Jeffcoat, the agency’s Houston director, said the time for venues to get their paperwork prepared is now.
“So when this program goes live, they’ll be ready,” Jeffcoat explained. “Just in the Houston area, we’ve got to have thousands of venues that fall in to the definition of these shuttered venues. We want them all to apply.”
Preparation entails gathering financial materials and registering with the System for Award Management at SAM.gov.
When the grant, called SVO for short, opens up for applications, it will do so in tiers. For the first 14 days, only venues that saw revenues between April and December 2020 plummet at least 90 percent from the same period a year before will be able to apply. The next two weeks, venues that have suffered a revenue loss of at least 70 percent during that period can apply. Then applications will open to any venue that has suffered a 25 percent revenue loss between one quarter of
2020 and the corresponding quarter from the year before. The program will stay open until it runs through its $15 billion in funding.
The SBA will soon release guidance on exactly what documentation is needed, but recommends getting together the nuts and bolts of what will be needed to show the drop in revenue required to apply.
Jeffcoat recommended those interested in applying use this time to register with SAM, the system the government uses to award vendors and grant recipients. Registering with SAM is a free but lengthy process that involves notarizing a letter and requesting a unique identification number.
“It’s not that hard, but it does take time,” Jeffcoat said. “It’s kind of like getting a passport… you have to prove you are who you say you are. So it won’t happen in a day.”
Businesses cannot take both a second round of Paycheck Protection Program loans and the SVO.
“You can’t get a Shuttered Venue Grant and PPP,” said Jeffcoat. “So it’s
important for small venues to understand which one’s going to give them the best advantages and which one is most likely for them.” While the SVO has $15 billion in funds, PPP has $284 billion. PPP money also comes in the form of low-interest loans that are only forgiven under certain conditions.
Guidance for the grants meant specifically for venues should come out in early February, Jeffcoat.said.
Operators like Cabaniss,
who have been pushing since May for a grant targeted specifically at music venues, expect to find few surprises in the guidance and are counting on the grants to bridge them over until the vaccine has gotten the pandemic under control.
“Everyone’s on standby,” he said. “Once the regs come out, we’ll be ready to go.”