Seventeen small businesses in Glens Falls have received $137,000 in Small Business Recovery Fund loans. The loans are capped at $7,500 each and are forgivable after 18 months.
Another $86,000 is still available to loan, James Thatcher of C.T. Male told the Glens Falls Local Development Corporation this morning. The City of Glens Falls and the LDC administer the program. Thatcher works with the city to administer the loan program.
"We're more than halfway through that pot of money,” he said. “These are one-, two-, three-person operations for the most part.”
The money comes from the original CARES Act of March 2020, but it comes to the city through the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Community Development Block Grant program for “entitlement communities” such as Glens Falls, Albany, Utica and other locations, Thatcher wrote in an email.
The small business loan fund filled a gap that some smaller businesses fell into during the pandemic: they were having a hard time staying afloat, but the primary help came in the form of the Paycheck Protection Program. Companies with few employees or without a large payroll had troubles accessing the PPP money, LDC members said during the meeting.
“I wasn't eligible for very much PPP because it's based upon your payroll," said City Council member Bill Collins at the meeting. He works full-time for Special Olympics, but his side hustle, Celtic Attitudes clothes, has a few seasonal employees. He said he received about $3,000 from PPP.
"It was enough to keep me, a month or two, from going down," he said. He did not apply for the city's loan. Others would not be so lucky with the PPP.
Collins said of the small business fund, "This is going to help them stay alive."
Mayor Dan Hall said that the city is expecting more money through the CDBG program, but he has not gotten guidance on how that money can be used.
He said, "I would say that at this point things are looking pretty bright for us to be able to help people."
A change was made in this story after publication to clarify that Collins received PPP funds but did not apply for the city's loan program.