KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Jake Imperiale applied last week for a loan to help his business, Bella Napoli. He still has not heard back.
“We're taking a huge hit right now,” said Imperiale, whose Italian deli has been in Brookside for 19 years.
In the coronavirus CARES Act, $376 billion will benefit small businesses, but Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri) told 41 Action News that the funds might not last long.
"There are some accounts in Washington that say those dollars will dry up by next week,” Cleaver said. “So there are a lot of small businesses that wanted to apply but did not because they had all kinds of issues and didn't know if they qualified. So we've got to try to take care of them.”
The Small Business Association of Kansas City said small businesses across the metro stand to benefit from the Paycheck Protection Plan and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Advance.
Tom Salisbury, regional administrator for Region 7 of the SBA, said money from both programs can go toward lease payment, rent, mortgage, utilities and payroll and “any small business can apply for both."
Imperiale is asking for roughly $200,000 from the Paycheck Protection Plan to pay employees and stay afloat.
"We filled out all the paperwork and we sent it to the bank on a Friday and they changed it on Monday,” he said. “So we redid it, and we sent it in and now we're just waiting to hear from them.”
The Kansas City Zoo was granted $2.2 million under the Paycheck Protection Plan, which will cover two months of its payroll.
"We've got a good size staffed, but I've got 2,000 animals that need care,” Zoo Director Randy Wisthoff said.
Those animals need daily feeding, Wisthoff said.
“It's just never-ending,” he said, “so making sure that I had trained professionals there at the zoo to handle the jobs was just imperative for the safety and well being of our animal collection."
The loan money comes with the potential of forgiveness. Salisbury said that if businesses are able to show at the end of a two-month period that payroll is the same as it was at the beginning, the “advance is being treated as a grant.”
"So it's a completely forgiven program,” Salisbury said, but there are rules.
"For example, they can't use the proceeds from one of these programs for the same purposes in the other,” Salisbury said.
As for businesses that are closed, he said they cannot use those dollars later when they reopen.
"The expectation is those dollars will be used now for the next two months,” Salisbury said.
