Indianola business owners give Axne feedback on pandemic programs

U.S. Representative Cindy Axne hosted a virtual town hall with members of the Indianola business community late last week to gather feedback on whether the small business programs the federal government has set up during the COVID-19 pandemic have been working.

Most of the conversation centered on the Paycheck Protection Program, or the PPP.

The PPP is a roughly $100 billion program that allows small businesses and other nonprofit entities to have zero fee loans up to $10 million, with eight weeks of average payroll and other costs forgiven, as long as businesses retain their employees and salary levels.

Axne said Congress is looking at putting an additional $250 billion into the PPP.

The point of the call was to make sure the money from the first round of PPP funding was trickling clear down to small businesses like it was designed to do.

"I want to make sure — we all want to make sure — that if we're going to put another $250 billion into this, that it truly is getting out to the people that it needs to get out to," Axne said.

Dean Binder, with the BnB Family Boutique in Indianola, told Axne it's just him and his wife at BnB.

He applied for the PPP and said someone from the program got a hold of him so he's hopeful that he got everything he applied for.

"I just want to say thank you for looking out for us because this is a very stressful time for people like us," Binder said. "This is our only income, and it's very, very stressful."

Kelly Webster, with Webster Creative, is the only employee at her business.

"It is extremely important that what you guys are doing keeps moving forward to help us survive this," Webster told Axne. "So, I too have applied for everything that I can find that I qualify for, and now it's just now it's just sitting in waiting to hear back if anything's gonna come through or not."

Rachel Gocken, the executive director of Warren County Economic Development, said it's obvious a lot of time and work has been put into developing the small business rescue programs.

"I think it's awesome that we are doing everything that we can," Gocken said. "It's obvious that at every level we're doing everything we can to try to keep these businesses afloat. The last thing we want is for anybody to have to shutter their doors completely because of this."

But, she said, there have been some kinks when businesses try to tap into the Small Business Administration loans.

Brenda Easter, the director of the Indianola Chamber of Commerce, said local banks are now so overwhelmed with SBA applications they're limiting applications they're accepting to the people who bank with them.

"I'm getting calls from businesses asking 'what do I do if my bank doesn't participate?'" Easter said. 

She also said the Iowa Economic Development Authority received an overwhelming number of applications for injury and disaster loans.

Easter said the IEDA received 14,000 applications for Economic Injury Disaster Loans. They were able to make 504 awards ranging between $5,000 and $25,000.

"There is going to be a whole slew of businesses who had applied for that...who aren't going to get those funds," Easter said. "So the federal money is becoming even more important today than probably when they had hope.

"I'm grateful that Congress passed the bill," Easter said. "You're doing a phenomenal job trying to serve so many very important populations, and the hospitals, and the first responders. You've got a really tough task and I think you've done a great job."

Easter later mentioned the PPP loans don't cover 501 C (6) organizations, or organizations such as the chamber of commerce or the WCEDC.

"If we don't get that kind of support it's likely we'll be, you know, laying off people or even shutting our doors as well," Easter said. "I mean, we're really in the same boat, as you know, as a sole proprietor or an independent contractor, really."

PHONE CALLS ACROSS THE 3rd CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

After the public town hall, Axne made time to answer some questions from the Independent Advocate.

Axne is hosting similar town hall meetings in all 16 of the counties she represents. She said she's been hearing different stories coming out of each county.

She's heard from nonprofits who are having a tough time trying to serve people during this pandemic, which is particularly destructive for people with mental health issues, because they are having a hard time getting the funding they need. They're either being told their bank is taking certain loans, or they're getting kicked out of the system.

"I hear one-off stories like that all the time," Axne said. "Or farmers having a difficult time getting what they need. Or small business owners, like we just talked about — Kelly, the one person who is really just trying to stay alive in this time.

"It really is about those individual stories that we're hearing," she said. "Whether it's somebody saying my bank won't do this, or I'm tied up in the system and I can't get through, all of these things are opportunities we're finding to improve the system."

One of the hardest parts about dealing with this pandemic, is no one knows how long it'll last. It makes planning difficult. 

"It is hard to plan out a month from now," Axne said. "The most important thing is to figure out what we can do right now on the ground to make people whole and that does mean improving on the pieces of legislation that we already put out there.

"But I would argue as well, that as much as we have to stay focused on getting things done to help people in the here in now we can't lose sight of the big issues that we need to address," she said. "Infrastructure is one of those. Our appropriation bills need to be done essentially by July so that we can ensure we can keep government up and running as we come back later in the year to our districts and are supposed to have more time in districts like in late summer. We do know that work needs to continue."

For now, though, most of the focus is on responding to the coronavirus.

"We are truly doing what we are supposed to do as representatives," Axne said. "We are on the ground working with our constituents finding out what those exact problems are."

She said she takes the ideas her constituents are giving her back to committees (the Financial Services Committee is handling the COVID-19 rescue grants and loans) and then she tries to get the ideas pushed up as priorities. Once they make it on the list as priorities, committee chairs meet together at the leadership level and figure out how to get the priorities into bills and onto the House floor.

"Not everything gets in, that's for sure," Axne said. "It's a negotiation... That's why I try to do so much from a bipartisan perspective so we can get more support when it comes down to the Speaker [Pelosi] sitting down with the minority leader [McCarthy] and working through this."

She said any feedback anyone can provide her on issues related to what they're going through with their business or organization is extremely helpful.

"It truly is not the fact that people want to exclude anybody from having opportunity," Axne said. "It's a matter of trying to work out massive legislation in an incredibly short period of time.

"When you think about it, you don't know about everything," Axne said. "The more people can push up to us the more that I can act on. And that's my job and I'm happy to do it."

Axne also emphasized that first and foremost, this pandemic is a healthcare issue.

"This is about keeping people healthy and safe in our communities," Axne said. "We are consistently working to not just fight the economic front with this, but putting funding towards our hospitals, our health care clinics, ensuring we are leveling the playing field when it comes to how those providers are servicing their patients."