The Columbia River Economic Development Council announced this week that it would begin accepting applications for a second round of emergency grants for Clark County businesses that have been hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Clark County Main Street Support Program will provide grants of up to $10,000 for businesses in the county with 10-20 employees, drawing from a total funding pool of about $432,000 from federal CARES Act funds and the state Working Washington Small Business Emergency Grant program.
The money can be used to reimburse rent expenses that were impacted by the pandemic, as long as those expenses were or will be incurred between March 1 and Nov. 6.
Businesses must meet several additional requirements to be eligible, including having been in business for at least one year, having a public-facing facility, office or storefront and being able to provide proof of how they’ve been impacted by COVID-19.
Applications will be accepted through the end of the day Saturday. Grant finalists will be contacted during the week of Sept. 28, according to a Wednesday press release from the CREDC. More information and applications can be found at credc.org/ccmssp.
“As CREDC continues to support businesses through COVID-19 response and recovery efforts, we are pleased to be able to bring a second round of emergency grants to Clark County,” CREDC President Jennifer Baker said in a statement. “Our focus on rent support is responsive to feedback we received from businesses hit particularly hard by the pandemic.”
The Clark County program has counterparts in other areas of the state; the CREDC was one of several local economic development organizations that worked with the Washington Department of Commerce to create local programs to distribute a total of $10 million in Working Washington Small Business Emergency Grant program.
The partner organizations are overseeing the applications and administration of their respective local funds, which means the Clark County program applications will be evaluated by the CREDC rather than the Department of Commerce.
The new $10 million round of funding is the second from the emergency grant program. The first round launched in April, initially with $5 million from the Working Washington strategic reserve fund, and later bolstered by another $5 million from the state’s COVID-19 emergency response fund.
The first round focused on businesses with up to 10 employees and drew about 25,000 applicants statewide, including over 1,500 applications in Clark County. The CREDC distributed about $526,000 of the funding to 49 Clark County companies, which helped prevent the loss of 226 jobs, according to CREDC communications director Monica Santos-Pinacho.
News of the Clark County Main Street Support Program comes a few days after Mercy Corps Northwest announced a partnership with Clark County and the city of Vancouver on a similar program to provide COVID-19 relief grants of up to $10,000 to local business owners with five or fewer employees.
Applications for that program can be found at mercycorpsnw.org/clarkcounty.
