City bids to ease small-business fees
San Francisco Mayor London Breed is readying a $9 million investment in city programs that assist small businesses, as escalating costs and the rise of e-commerce continue to hurt independent retailers.
The funding will boost the budgets of existing programs that provide low-interest loans to small-business owners and grants for facade and signage renovations.
As part of Breed’s broader push to rein in city bureaucracy, the investments also will give small retailers rebates on ongoing permit fees.
Breed is expected to announce the small-business investments Wednesday, days ahead of the May 31 rollout of the city’s budget.
The investment won’t address one of the main reasons behind the tide of vacancies: long wait times to open. The city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst Office found it took 81⁄2 months on average for new businesses to get the permits needed to open between 2015 and 2017 in the Upper Market and Castro commercial corridors.
Breed tried to address some of those issues with legislation she authored with District Five Supervisor Vallie Brown that seeks to fill the glut of vacant storefronts by making it easier to open retail businesses. That legislation, currently sitting in committee, was wedded to nearly $1 million for smallbusiness subsidies, legal and operational assistance, and research into the causes of vacancies.
“We are working to make significant investments and policy changes to help small businesses start, grow and remain in our city so business owners can spend less time navigating City Hall and more time serving their customers and providing jobs for residents in our neighborhoods,” Breed said in a statement.
The biggest block of money — $4 million — will be used to create a new grant program to help small businesses and nonprofits that want to operate out of ground-floor retail
and office spaces inside of the city’s affordable housing developments.
The Office of Economic and Workforce Development is still working out the program’s details and could not immediately provide an inventory of how many spaces are currently available inside affordable housing developments or how many might be in the pipeline.
Another $2 million is earmarked to create a new program that would refund some recurring permit fees.
For example, businesses with point-of-sale systems can be charged hundreds of dollars each year to operate their cash registers. Restaurants that want to add certain types of openflame candles to their tables must pay a fee to the Fire Department. And restaurants, bars and breweries must cough up a fee to the Department of Public Health if they store at least 1,000 cubic feet of carbon dioxide tanks.
OEWD is also still in the process of setting up the fee-rebate system, but officials estimate that eligible businesses could receive up to $200 back from the city each year.
“We have to pay a fee to have a burglar alarm system. You have to pay a fee to the city to have that. At a certain point, enough already, people,” said Daniel Bergerac, co-owner of Mudpuppy's Tub & Scrub, a doggrooming shop on Castro Street.
Making money “is getting harder to do in this city. It’s fantastic that the mayor has heard our pleas to start working on some of this nickel-and-diming business that every small business faces,” said Bergerac, who’s also past president of the Castro Merchants Association.
Another $1 million will be used to grow the city’s revolving loan fund for small businesses, which offers low-interest loans to small merchants who might otherwise be turned away from traditional banks.
The final $2 million has been allocated for SF Shines, a program that provides grants for small businesses to make building improvements, including signage, painting, compliance with disability laws and other maintenance. The program previously had a budget of $687,000. Breed’s plan will infuse $1 million for each of the next two fiscal years on top of that.
Lea Sabado, owner of Excelsior Coffee, was able to get $35,000 from the program for key accessibility renovations to her cafe’s front entrance — work that would otherwise have come out of her own pocket. She also used the money to purchase a stand-alone refrigerator and a sink.
Sabado said she “probably would have been (financially) tapped out in the middle of all this without SF Shines. Everything has a price tag on it.”