They’re Ready To Serve To Prevent Stimulus Repeat

With $60 billion in Covid-19 relief headed to cities to boost hard-to-reach small businesses, Miguel Pittman, Rodney Williams, and Jayuan Carter stand ready to help New Haven get it right this time.

The trio run small businesses in town. They’ve managed so far to stay in business during the Covid-19 pandemic. Pittman even managed to obtain one of those elusive forgivable loans that ended up going largely to bigger businesses or white-run businesses in the first round of federal ​“small business” help.

All three watched fellow minority-owned small businesses get left out of the race for that first pot of money.

President Trump signed a new round of emergency relief Thursday night that specifically targets $60 million to community banks to seek to include those hard-to-reach small businesses, including minority-owned businesses, largely left out of the first phase. But unless New Haven does a better job connecting with small businesses on the margin, a rerun might be in the offing.

Williams cautioned that many black self-employed business people lack the paperwork or accounting back-up to apply under regular guidelines. And they’re not tapped into networks in the city or banks to dive into the competitive online race for emergency funds.

He cited the barbers who work in shops in Fair Haven, Dixwell, Newhallville and along Whalley and are now ​“on life support.”.

“What about the guys who rent barber shop chairs for $150 a week?” Williams said during a joint appearance with Pittman and Carter on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” Politicians ​“go into barbershops looking for votes. They don’t go into barbershops [asking], ​‘How can I help you?’” now that federal pandemic relief is on the way.

The barbers ​“don’t have that paperwork. But they’re in business. They’re hiring people in the community. They’re benefiting the state of Connecticut. With this virus, we need to look past the paperwork and save these businesses.”

Williams noted that the warm winter deprived some black contractors like him of the usual bounty of snow-clearing work. ​“This virus gave us a double blow,” he said.

In addition to re-examining the rules for some of the emergency aid, government needs to work alongside people in black and brown communities to connect with the small business people who have been left out of the process, the three ​“Dateline” panelists agreed.

A day earlier, Mayor Justin Elicker said in his daily Zoom briefing that his administration has been discussing how to improve outreach this time around. The administration set up this portal on the city website for small-business applicants. Elicker alsosuggested that volunteers involved in the ​“VITA” program, which helps low-income people file taxes, could pivot to helping small business owners complete applications for Covid-19 emergency relief.

“In my neighborhood, who knows that particular organization?” Pittman responded on ​“Dateline,” referring to VITA.

Pittman and his wife Sandra have for decades run a successful restaurant in the Hill, Sandra’s Next Generation Soul Food. They employ 27 people. So when the first round of federal small business loans were made available, Pittman hopped on line at 10 a.m. on a Monday. He wrestled with the faulty website until 4:23 p.m. And he succeeded in obtaining a forgivable loan equal to two and half months of payroll. That will help him recover losses incurred when he decided to keep his entire staff in place during the pandemic despite a 35 percent drop in business

He was able to prevail because, as a longstanding business owner, he had an account. He had all the tax filings and budget documents needed to place right into the application. ​“I feel bad about the ones that weren’t able to get money and put in that paperwork,” he said.

Carter, who runs a landscaping business called Executive Ecoscaping, also had paperwork ready, from when he previously applied for a loan to buy equipment. He put in an application for a $20,000 line of credit with a Connecticut emergency relief fund targeting women and minority-owned businesses. He received an acknowledgement, but has not received the money — far more people have applied than can be covered by the existing fund. (Read more about that here.)

Williams didn’t apply for money. His sheetrocking business has pending deals to start work on two major development projects scheduled to resume in coming weeks, he said. He anticipates having enough work for up to dozen people.

In the meantime, he, Carter, and Pittman said they’d be more than happy to devote several hours a week to helping connect the small business owners they know in their neighborhoods with any city-led effort to help them apply for the new round of relief money, as well as to share their expertise.

“I’m ready,” Carter said. ​“You have my cell.”

Click on the video to watch the full episode of ​“Dateline New Haven” with Rodney Williams, Miguel Pittman, and Jayuan Carter.