Boma - Regular Meeting

Okay. Welcome, everybody, to the work session for the Board of Mayor and Alderman. We're going to call the roll. Alderman Barnhill? Here. Alderman Blanton is absent. Alderman Caesar? Present. Alderman Peterson?

Here.

Alderman Berger? Present. Alderman Brown? Present. Alderman Potts? Present. And Vice Mayor Baggett? Present. And the mayor all here. Next item is citizen comments for items not on the agenda. I have no speaker cards for that. We'll keep moving along, and we're glad to welcome... Tracy Gale from the Small Business Administration Office of Disaster Recovery for a brief presentation. So, welcome.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And Alderman, thank you for having me tonight. In the way that you serve your community, I serve with the Office of Disaster Recovery. I've enjoyed my time here so far. I've got a few more months on site. And it's a sad reason that brought me here with the amount of damage you had with the ice storm, but I've loved every day of it. So thank you for all your hospitality. I want to take a quick minute, and I realize you have a very jam-packed work session, jam-packed agenda tonight, so I'm going to skip through a lot of the slides and just give you the high points. But I want to tell you that as a primary declaration county for this disaster, Winter Storm Fern, there are three programs available to your citizens. There's A lot of money available at very low interest rates, and that's what I'm going to talk to you about tonight. We have been on the ground here working Williamson County and Maury County, which is my other primary disaster declaration county, since April 16th. We will continue to do that. This is a wonderful opportunity to get the word out. If you have other options or if you get phone calls from businesses or someone who hears about our program and you're like, I need to help this constituent, my contact information is on the second to the last slide here. I will be more than happy to call them back directly and then report back to you how that conversation went. So for the benefit of the people that are watching live tonight, I want to give this out before I begin. The phone number to start an application for one of our programs is 1-800-659-2955. The other option, which, believe it or not, it's a federal website, but it's a very easy one, that's the believe it or not part, is lending.sba.gov. And anyone can go there, and then you click on the second column, which is check my eligibility. And when you click on that, it'll go to a page with a drop-down menu, and you pick Tennessee, and you're in. So that's how easy it goes. And I just wanted to share that before I get started. Okay, let me open the program, the PowerPoint for you.

Yeah, we purposely didn't let anybody look at this. Okay. It's sneaky. So it's like Christmas. I don't know why they put it that way. It is kind of odd, isn't it?

Okay, I would like to do slideshow. Okay, well, we'll go with what we have. So... Yeah, I'm, let's see, that should be okay. There we go. I'm going to skip that. Okay. So the types of disaster loans that we have available are, are you doing it for me or am I doing it?

I have now.

Okay. I'm like, wow, that's really cool. So we have disaster loans for homeowners. And for renters, and before I joined SBA, I didn't realize that we have full benefits available for renters. I checked before I flew up here, and a high percentage of your residents are renters. So if, for example, their car or their truck was damaged by falling trees or something during the ice storm fern, They're just as eligible as a business owner or homeowner for benefits. We have home disaster loans and we have mitigation assistance and that's our Build Back Better program. So anyone that qualifies for a home loan with us, They can automatically get an extra 20% to get better clamps on the roof, get stronger windows, anything to help them protect themselves from the next event, whether it's a tornado, flooding, whatever. The other program we have we refer to as EIDL, and that's Economic Injury Disaster Loans. These are working capital loans for payroll. for maybe quarterly business taxes that they couldn't pay because January and February were a wash. Those loan programs usually are the bulk of our applicants because the requirements are much less I don't say comprehensive, but they're much easier for an independent business owner to apply for than going through a bank. Our loans are from the U.S. Treasury. They're not through any bank. They're not dealing with any bank. I wanted to share with you the loan limits. So businesses, nonprofits, including churches, up to $2 million for grounds and facilities. building damage. For small businesses and private nonprofits, again, up to $2 million. Individual homeowners can get $500,000 to repair their property. Now, this is really Let's look at this money as a tool in your toolkit. It's the kind of money where while you're waiting for your insurance payout or maybe I have one gentleman in Maury County with a barbecue restaurant and he just bought a new refrigerator for his business. It was like two months old and his insurance is only paying 30% of the value. So because of that, he's taking an EIDL loan while he negotiates with the insurance. So I look at especially the EIDL program as just kind of like a tool in the recovery toolbox. You can apply for the money. There's no charge to apply, and you don't have to take it. If ultimately you settle with your insurance or you're good, it doesn't go against your credit. You don't have to take the money. Um, renters, uh, can get $100,000 for damages that they sustained to their, um, if they are renting a condominium and, you know, their business, their office equipment got damaged, even though they're renting, it's still, uh, a perfectly legitimate reason to apply. They also can get money, like I said, for their vehicles outside the property. And the owner of that condo can also apply. There can be two applications for the same building. And then the mitigation, I mentioned that earlier, that's Build Back Better, that's up to 20% to build back their home or business stronger. So we have low fixed interest rates. Our program gives 12 months with no repayment and 12 months with no interest accruing. We want businesses and homeowners to get back on their feet and get 100% before they have to worry about paying us back. They can pick their time to repay. They have up to 30 years, and there's no prepayment penalty. Loans can be used for relocation. I mentioned the renters.