On March 24, 2022, Fall River, Massachusetts, held an award ceremony for the ARPA Small Business Recovery Grant Program, distributing grants to 49 small businesses. To date, $157,500 in applications have been approved and awarded. The program, which received an allocation of up to $3 million from the ARPA advisory panel in December, aims to assist businesses with 10 or fewer employees and non-profits in recovering from the economic impacts of the pandemic. Mayor Coogan and Ken Fiola highlighted the vital role of small businesses in Fall River's economy and urged attendees to spread awareness about the remaining funds. They directed interested small business owners to the Bristol County Economic Development Consultants website. The application process is rolling, with the goal of disbursing the full $3 million by 2026. A small business owner named Raj expressed profound gratitude for the program, praising its ease and the crucial support it provides.
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Council
Public / Other
uh we want to thank everyone for coming out today on a nice rainy morning in fall river but it's very very sunny up here on the sixth floor for a lot of small businesses in fall river i want to thank everyone for being here and i want to introduce some of the people that help to make the decisions on the opera money seth mike sullivan jim carrey paul furlin mike dion and ken fiola
0:27are all on the opera committee and we all evaluate policies and procedures going forward and it's really special for us to have you all here today to join us um it's a great morning and we're going to award grants to 49 small businesses through the arpa small business recovery grant program as most of the people in the room know i also want to make sure we acknowledge skyler from representative schmidt's
0:54office came by to join us too as most of the people in the room know forward was given a large pot of money through the american rescue plan act together with the opera advisory panel the city of fall river has been reviewing proposals and exploring the best ways to use this money so that it benefits the residents the economy and our city opera money has limitations about how it
1:17can be spent but one of the biggest and most important categories outlined for arpa was for recovery of negative economic impacts on businesses caused by the pandemic and we know the small business felt a stronger impact than many other areas when you combine months of shutdown staffing shortages child care issues reduced indoor dining and you get a truly unprecedented strain on many of these people here today our
1:50small business owners the backbone of fall river that is why in december the opera advisory panel voted to approve an allocation of up to three million dollars to create this grant program businesses with 10 or less employees all can receive grants through the fall river arpa program fall river small businesses are the backbone of our city they are the family bakeries who have passed down through
2:19generations from resident to resident to the restaurants that attract visitors from out of town the important services that keep our community going our salons our small businesses our garages that's what we wanted to focus on this funding can also be given to non-profits who struggled because they couldn't even raise funds during the pandemic and in today's list of recipients we have auto body shops also salons
2:45chiropractors opticians opticians restaurants bakeries contractors and more it's an honor to be able to give them these award and provide them supports the and this money they receive goes back into the economy in fall river which is what this is all about use it to stimulate more activity economically in the city that's what we want to do and it's important to note that this is
3:11just the beginning there is still plenty of funding left today and today's group represents a small fraction of the eligible businesses in the city i ask everyone to help spread the word please direct any small business owners you may know to the bristol county economic development consultants website so that we can connect with them and help them with funding again this is exactly what opera wanted
3:36us to do with this money get it back into the community so it's spent in restaurants stores and shops around the city and um the person that spearheaded this on the technical side um i want to also thank um the opera panel for all the work they do we have another meeting next week and um ken fiola has been the one that's correlating all these grant applications and making sure that
4:03the people meet the criteria we asked for when we uh started this program i'm going to introduce ken right now and let me come up and say a few words um good morning uh thank you uh for all for coming out on this uh dreary rainy day but i think uh it's well worth your visit here because people here will be leaving with something that i know is going to be worth your trip here
4:29before we get to that though i just want to thank the opera committee in particular mayor coogan for really coming up with this idea to make this money available to small businesses as you all know you know many instances when we have press conferences up here in the fall river room they're to announce meditek or amazon or blunt or some other large company coming into the community creating
4:53hundreds of jobs creating you know thousands of dollars in tax revenues and those are all great projects but i really you know want to impress upon the community the importance of small businesses because small businesses are truly the lifeblood and the backbone of this community when we're putting this plan together and figuring out how many small businesses are out there that actually
5:17employ less than ten people it's about two thousand okay so there's a very significant number number of those small businesses ranging from mom and pop shops to you know self-employed people sole proprietorships what have you those people are out there like you on a daily basis really creating the vibrancy of the business community and it's this type of program that allows us to reward you for your efforts
5:46because you unlike some of the larger companies felt the pandemic greater and deeper than some of these larger companies because the larger companies have the resources to withstand that type of your downturn in the economy the small businesses don't have that okay this is every dollar is important to you it's not like you know you've got a multiple multiple bank accounts that you
6:12can draw from to withstand these types of uh pandemic um impacts upon your business so we get that and fall river is truly one of the only communities that are actually doing this nationwide we're putting money back into the hands of those businesses uh that were impacted moving forward you know as the mayor has indicated we have three million dollars to give out that's a lot of money
6:37excuse me at the end of the day we don't want to have any money left okay we want to give all this money out because that's what it's here here for we want to help these businesses you know get some of the you know the money that's due to them as a result of the pandemic but we're all going we're only going to be able to do that with your help okay word of mouth is our
6:58biggest ally and our biggest asset and our biggest friend today so when you get your checks today i implore and beg of you go out and tell your other business owners tell your friends tell your families tell everybody you come into that this money is available and they can access it through our website at bristolcountyedc.com and specifically they can answer kelly siddecki from my office who's working
7:24specifically on this grant allocation process but we don't want to fail at the end of two three years we don't want to have to go back to the man and say yeah we had the three million and we could only get out a million no i want to get out this three million dollars i don't want this money to go back not that we don't want it to go back into the streets and sewers yeah
7:45he watches us you know we want to get this in the hands of small businesses with the money will not be wasted if it doesn't go to small businesses but the true intent of this program is to put this money in your pocket in the pockets of those like you are throughout the community we've tried to make the grant application as easy as possible um it's a two-page application there's
8:04some information that you have to get to us in order to to access these funds but as you can see you've all successfully navigated it our office is here to help answer questions um you know within that regard itself so once again thank you please get the word out to other businesses so that we can disperse this money and at this point i think what we'd like to do is um
8:30start giving out the checks if that's okay so um we have all the checks with us so if you didn't respond to us and said that you were coming or weren't coming um that's no big deal right kelly we have the checks with us so we can uh allocate those uh to the ones that may have not responded i have in my hands here you know the checks it's like everybody gets a check right
8:54it's like oprah ellen degeneres um so we're gonna start we're gonna start calling them out in no particular order um but this mayor said there's 157 500 in approved applications uh to date and we have a few more that came in uh over the last week or so that we haven't gotten to those so we're in a processing process of processing them now but moving forward this is unless you know maybe at another time we'll have
9:22another big press conference but moving forward as applications come in we're just going to start um approving them and issuance issuing the checks there's not going to be a lot of fanfare about it you come in you get your application approved we make the note you sign the proper paperwork and then we're just going to start cutting the checks and issuing and then i regard so there's no prolonged period
9:45of time in which you have to wait i got one question here charlie is there no there's no this is a rolling application process technically we would have until 2026 to spend the opera monies uh but we're hoping we want i'd love to get i'd love to get three million dollars out in one year i think that would be you know a herculean task you know that would represent you know 1500 to 2000 businesses or a
10:13thousand businesses depending on whether they're eligible for a 500 grand or a 5 000 grand so it's a it's a rolling application okay here we go oh i'm sorry do you mind playing yes please few of though giving this presentation but on behalf of all the businesses that will learn we also need to take a moment to show our gratitude and our appreciation i want to take a moment to thank you all
10:44for doing this for us small business owners i personally i was shut down for almost three months and sometimes you feel like you're an island all by yourself i have a staff i had to pay during that time we were nervous we were very unsure of those times but it's people like you that make us feel like we're not on an island all by ourselves so on behalf of the small businesses here in fall river
11:09i want to take a moment to say thank you this this
11:24gratitude we are with appreciation it was a very easy process your staff is absolutely wonderful i i just think we need to thank you as well and it comes from a heart we are small businesses this this stipends these brands allow us to thrive it allows us to move forward more importantly in hard times whenever that may be you're behind us and there's nothing to be said in those senses thank you very much
11:56well like uh thank you for that raj and um you know we are all like i like to say you know we're we're all in this together right we're all one big family so i think we all lean upon each other to try to help everybody through these times thank you okay here we go spindle city auto glass there you go
12:33a phoenix aluminum uh window
12:46there you go thank you i'm shorty's pub
13:02vacation there you go thank you old world distributors
13:21mad house grill absolutely auto repair and inspection bob okay south main news and lottery no okay straight shooters family billiards no problem thank you okay body by sheila there you go okay so animal rescue league of fall river there we are there you go
14:22a voice and not an echo and i thank you and the mayor and the committee from uh making a voice thank you for the small business appreciate it thank you we have is luminess here ah yes yes good to see you united builders there we go south main news and lottery fall river spine and disk raj is there anybody here that we missed that didn't get back to us with regard to um their attendance
15:19no we got everybody everybody's got their checks everybody's happy everybody's good what is it chocolato chocolate yes oh yep
15:38anybody else in front of this that's been there no no good going back okay uh kelly you're gonna yes bill can i do want to send you to a girl that's done a lot of work for you kelly yeah
16:00kelly's a new addition to the office we're very happy to have her and she's a breath of fresh air so again please help us get the word out we don't want to keep this money we want to get in the hands of the small businesses that are deserving of it and uh let's keep pushing um the uh the positive agenda of fall river forward thank you very much