VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. – Volusia County will begin offering $3,000 grants to local small businesses that have been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.
The county will open the application window later this week for a $10 million grant program to help small businesses financially recover from weeks of closures, according to a news release.
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Local businesses that meet the grant criteria, including those with no more than 25 full-time employees or the equivalent number of part-time employees, can qualify for a one-time, $3,000 grant under the program, county leaders said.
According to a news release, small businesses must be a physical business located in a commercial or industrial space, licensed to operate in Volusia County or the local city where they’re located if a license is required and were operational and actively conducting business in Volusia County on or before Dec. 1, 2019. Tax exempt businesses and businesses that are either a publicly traded company or a subsidiary of a publicly traded company don’t qualify for the program, according to county leaders.
Additionally, businesses must certify that they suffered a financial impact of at least $3,000 due to COVID-19 and that the loss wasn’t reimbursed by insurance or some other governmental assistance program.
Those impacts can be anything from a loss of revenue due to an interruption in business like the cost of installing safety measures like Plexiglas dividers, UV sanitizing cabinets or hand sanitizing stations needed to resume normal business operations, county leaders said.
A complete list of qualification criteria will be listed on the county web site.
“With 12,000 small businesses in Volusia County, there’s enough money for approximately 3,300 of them to receive a county grant," county leaders said in a news release. “Applications will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis, with the application posted on the county’s new Volusia Business Resources web site: https://www.volusiabusinessresources.com.”