Businesses’ requests for grants top $147M
State currently has $55M available
The fledgling Arkansas Ready for Business grant program received 12,233 applications seeking a total of $147.7 million, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Commerce said Wednesday night.
The total sought is almost three times the amount available, $55 million.
The program is designed to provide grants of up to $100,000 each to companies for expenses associated with ensuring the health and safety of employees and patrons in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The applications were submitted April 29 and on Tuesday and Wednesday, said department spokesman Alisha Curtis. The numbers are preliminary and subject to further review by the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, she said.
The applications came from businesses employing 196,001 full-time employees and 50,220 part-time employees, Curtis said.
She said 11,565, or 94.5%, of the applications were from businesses with 50 or fewer employees, and this group will be allocated at least 75% of the final approved funding.
Curtis said 5,664 applications are from minority-, female- or disabled veter
an-owned businesses and that they made up a total $40.6 million, or 27.5%, of the requested amount.
“These results will be presented to ALC [Arkansas Legislative Council] on Friday for their consideration as to whether they will allocate more funding to the program beyond the $55 million presently authorized,” Curtis said. “No grant awards can be disbursed until the funding amount is finalized by the ALC.”
Most of the applicants “are exactly the kind of people that we want to be able to help, the small businesses, the ones that are struggling to get back on their feet, and putting this money back in the economy is a good thing that helps the businesses, but helps our economy grow as well,” Gov. Asa Hutchinson told the steering committee that he created to recommend the best way to use $1.25 billion in federal coronavirus-related funds. The committee met late Wednesday afternoon.
Hutchinson’s administration originally intended for the Arkansas Ready for Business program to have $15 million in federal funds, but the initial demand spurred discussions of increasing the level of funding. He sought an increase to $100 million for the program. Legislative leaders on Sunday authorized the use of $55 million in federal funds for the program.
On April 29, the first day the program took applications, it received 2,392 applications seeking more than $36 million in just an hour.
The next day, the Republican governor said he was incredibly surprised by the number of applications. He also acknowledged that the application website was rolled out prematurely and that the program lacked approval from legislative leaders for its spending authority.
Hutchinson’s request for spending authority of $100 million for the program, he said, was in response to state legislators’ requests for more funding for it.
That led to a temporary standoff between House leaders such as Speaker Matthew Shepherd, R-El Dorado, who favored granting $100 million in spending authority for the program, and a contingent of senators who proposed to set the amount at $50 million, allow the program to accept applications for two more days, and then consider whether to again raise its spending authority.
On Sunday, House and Senate leaders settled on $55 million, with at least 75% of the money going to businesses with fewer than 50 employees and at least 15% of the recipients being minority- and female-owned businesses.
The Arkansas Economic Development Commission accepted applications from 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Hutchinson told the Arkansas Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act Steering Committee late Wednesday afternoon that “we need to have an overarching view as to where we need to be going and the time frame in which we need to make decisions.”
The committee is named after the federal law that provides coronavirus-related aid totaling $1.25 billion to Arkansas. The committee is made up of eight of Hutchinson’s department heads, one of his aides, three senators and three representatives.
Last week, some senators said that the state needs to develop a strategy for using the federal funds.
Hutchinson told the steering committee that it was initially designed to take care of emergency funding needs such as the purchase of personal protective equipment to assist front-line workers such as nurses and long-term care workers, and “you have responded very quickly and you have done this.”
“The second part of the equation is to take a longer-term look at the needs of our state and how we can strategically approach this fall in terms of the possibility of a resurgence of covid-19, but also in terms of our economy and how we can remedy some of its weaknesses right now,” he said.
Hutchinson said the steering committee has recommended the use of $325 million in federal funds, and “we are still waiting on approval of $148 million that has not received that approval [from the Legislative Council], so it’s not out yet and they have denied $45 million in approval for Arkansas [Ready for Business] grant program.”
He said, “If I am correct, we still don’t have the money in the field yet for our nurses through the hospital program because that is not yet been approved by” the Legislative Council.
“We hope the [council] will approve those necessary appropriations as quickly as possible because you can see that some of these were approved some time ago but haven’t been acted upon. So we haven’t got the money to the people that we were designing it for yet, and some of that is on our process; some of it is on just the nature of the approval process,” he said.
Hutchinson said the state Department of Health needs federal funds for its infrastructure for contact tracing capacity this fall to hold off a possible resurgence of the coronavirus, and a decision on that needs to be made in June at the latest.
Contact tracing, testing and other health care infrastructure also are needed by other state institutions, including the state’s higher-education institutions. The decision for that federal funding should be made in June or July at the latest, he said.
The third priority is an investment in telehealth and online education platforms, he said. That decision should be made in July at the latest because the Department of Commerce is taking rural broadband grant applications through August, he said.
Part of these federal funds also should be used for the economic recovery, “but the quicker we can make decisions in terms of our economic recovery, then the quicker we are going to recover,” Hutchinson said. “And I hate to give money out in November that is going to help spur our economy, if it can rationally and thoughtfully be done earlier.”
“We have to ask the question, what other investments are needed in terms of our economy?” he asked.
Hutchinson said the fifth item is using federal funds for vaccine distribution infrastructure, and “that’s a possibility for this fall.”
He said he also is aware of a request for federal funds for emergency medical technicians and ambulance services to help them through this time.
“The cities and counties are looking at what they can qualify for in terms of coverage of this CARES Act funding,” Hutchinson said.
Another item “is social needs that are caused by the pandemic, whether it is infrastructure improvements for our homeless population, our homeless shelters, whether it is any support that’s needed for our food banks,” he said. “But social needs have to be part of our discussions in terms of the use of this funding.”
Hutchinson said he’s outlined what he thinks needed to be funded and that “each of you probably can come up with your own list; hopefully they’ll be similar in some fashions.”
“But you have heard from others, and there might be additions obviously to that list,” he said. “I hope that you all can work on an overarching strategy for this.”
The steering committee later rejected proposed rules of procedures for the committee from Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View. Along with Irvin, Sens. Will Bond, D-Little Rock, and David Wallace, R-Leachville, were the only committee members to vote for the proposal, after several committee members said they wanted to see a handful of changes in the proposal in writing before they vote on it.
Then, the committee voted to consider the proposal, with some possible changes, during its next meeting at 4 p.m. next Wednesday.
Under Irvin’s proposal, the committee would be required to recommend allocating the available funds from the coronavirus relief fund to ensure the state’s needs are met in public health, including testing, public health entities and hospital aid; education and schools, including early childhood education, K-12 and higher education; economic stimulus and small- and minority-owned businesses; state agency budget needs resulting from the covid-19 public health emergency, including additional personnel and costs; city, town and county needs; and broadband identification and/or deployment.