welcome back helping vermonters recover from the flooding we know it's going to be a long road and the state is trying to let affected residents know about the resources that are available to them here to talk about the economic side of This Disaster is Department of Economic Development commissioner Joan Goldstein thank you for being here thanks very much glad to be here so on Monday your department announced new information about the business emergency Gap assistance program it's a 20 million
fund to help businesses and non-profits recover from the flooding what should people know about applying for that and what amounts of money are going to be available to them yes thanks um the application portal will be about Thursday folks should know is that as they collect their information for damages that's whether it's damages to real estate loss of inventory equipment all of those details they should collect and have at the ready so that when they're ready to apply they could just upload t
hose details to the application what folks will do is upload their total damages give us information about any insurance this is even if they don't have flood insurance we just want to know a bit more about their insurance coverage or lack thereof and also whether or not they've received grants from other sources and then from that net uncovered damage figure we will take 20 percent of that to calculate the award the ceiling is twenty thousand dollars and we have exceptions to that ceiling if to
tal damages uh are more than a million dollars if total damages are more than a million dollars then we're going to have a sliding scale depending on the number of employees for example if you have over 50 employees you could get up to 500 000 if you have between 11 and 50 employees you can get up to 250 000 and if you have 10 employees or less it'll be up to 100 000 so we're acknowledging that there are some complete and total losses of businesses and we want to accommodate that as well is this
an honor System I know you mentioned that you wanted to know about other grants people might be getting but is it really just kind of up to the individual to report truthfully to you what they had for losses well yes of course uh we want people to be truthful we do have attestations at the end of the application that basically the right to um get funding back if if need be if we paid more than what the estimated loss is now we do have cushion built in since we're only paying 20 of net uncovered
damages so we clearly understand that this is not going to meet all of the need and so even if there's a timing issue sometimes grants come out after our grant has come out but we think that the cushion of the 80 of the rest of their losses still need to be covered the agency of Commerce and Community Development has a severe storm recovery resource up and running what sorts of information could people find there well you'll definitely find the information about the business emergency Grant a p
rogram that we're opening we also have links to the SBA disaster Loan program and general information about where to report damage was still as a state collecting two-on-one information so that we could aggregate the entire physical damages as well as economic injury so that we could petition and try to get some funding from the federal government you know again we recognize that any little bits of money we have not going to be enough but we do need the data in order to help justify the request
for additional Are there specific resources in particular that you think people aren't using enough or aren't aware of well we do get some of the SBA data and it looks like there's only been about 100 applications so far business applications now this could reflect that not everybody wants to take out a loan and we fully appreciate that but it is a resource that's available until September 12th and so we do always want to bring attention to that that folks should apply they could always turn dow
n the loan they don't have to accept the loan but they should apply to the SBA disaster loan because it's available and as they piece together the various sources they may be in a position to say okay I can open and so that's what we hope for everybody that this program that we're opening the other charitable organizations also have some pots of money and the SBA could be the remainder so we we do think that's being underutilized just based on the data that's been sent by SBA now I asked about d
eadlines you need to know about also Lessons Learned From tropical storm Irene you can hear our full conversation coming up this Sunday morning at 11 30 on you can quote me
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