NYS COVID relief program gave $111 million to Long Island small businesses
Long Island Video Enterprises LIVE Inc. was among about 4,600 small firms on Long Island that shared in state pandemic funds. Credit: Rick Kopstein
Nearly 4,600 small businesses and for-profit arts groups on Long Island received a total of $111 million in state grants to bounce back from the pandemic, according to a Newsday analysis of new data.
More than 96% of the beneficiaries of New York State’s marquee business-relief program — the $800 million COVID-19 Pandemic Small Business Recovery Grant Program — were the smallest employers with 10 or fewer people on their payroll.
Many were based in homes or owned by women and members of minority groups, the analysis shows.
For some, the New York grant program, which started in summer 2021, arrived in the nick of time as they had used up earlier help from the federal government: Paycheck Protection Program loans and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loans. Others had missed out on that relief and were hanging on by a thread, according to entrepreneurs and their advocates.
"The state grants helped them stay afloat," said Michael Genova, a business adviser specializing in disaster relief at the Small Business Development Center at Farmingdale State College.
"A lot of businesses were helped [because] they now had money to take care of their employees, to keep their staff for when the pandemic was over," he said, recalling the worker shortage that followed COVID's worst years. "Other businesses hadn’t gotten any help before receiving the state grant."
The grant amounts ranged from $5,000 to $50,000 depending on the applicant’s gross receipts in 2019 before the virus struck. The funds could be used for costs incurred between March 2020 and April 2021, including employee wages, rent or mortgage payments, insurance, utility bills, taxes and COVID precautions such as masks, gloves and air filters.
Genova and the late Patty LeBas, another business adviser specializing in disaster relief, were assigned to help new clients of the SBDC-Farmingdale in determining which pandemic-relief programs they were eligible for and how to apply. The center assisted about 1,000 businesses during the crisis.
When the state grants become available, the SBDC-Farmingdale publicized them via email and social media.
When the email message landed in Jennifer Ackerson’s inbox in June 2021 her consulting business, Alon Tourism Solutions in Farmingdale, had been closed for 15 months. She recalled thinking that Alon wasn’t eligible for the state assistance and only applied in December 2021.
The $43,309 grant "gave me peace of mind during the very difficult time of rebuilding my business with so many unknowns," said Ackerson, who assists and trains U.S. tourist destinations, hotels, restaurants, shops and others to work with international tour operators.
With countries closing their borders in March 2020 to slow the coronavirus’ spread, Alon was forced to shut down and lay off its five employees. Ackerson went on unemployment and paid bills with two PPP loans totaling $101,525 and a COVID-19 EIDL grant and loan of $29,000. She wasn’t eligible for forgiveness of the PPP loans because she had let her employees go.
"Our industry was completely shut down and there was no guarantee that we were going to be successful again, that visitors from overseas would come to America again," Ackerson said. "We made it through [the pandemic] but it could have gone the other way."
She said she used the state money to participate in a key trade show and to hire a second employee after Alon reopened in November 2021. The 24-year-old company now has eight employees and about $750,000 in yearly revenue.
"I’m doing better than I ever have and I’m grateful for all the help that I received," Ackerson said, adding the state grant program "allowed us small guys to survive."
Alon is among 3,037 small businesses and for-profit arts organizations in Nassau County that secured state funding, or 66% of the region’s total. In Suffolk County, 1,552 were helped, according to the analysis of data obtained under the state's Freedom of Information Law.
About half the entities that completed and submitted the grant application won a share of the $760 million that was distributed statewide. Applicants from Long Island, as a group, received the second-most funding after the $520 million garnered by New York City applicants.
Still, the average grant amount was larger on the Island than statewide: $24,188 vs. $18,608, the analysis shows.
"Every program that we start we do question whether it will reach the people that we want it to reach," said Anna Kaplan, who pushed for the grant program’s creation in spring 2021 when she led the state Senate’s small business and economic development committee.
"It’s most gratifying to hear that microbusinesses with 10 or fewer employees were the beneficiaries," she said. "I really did advocate very, very hard to put money in the [2021-22 state] budget for small businesses because I knew many of them weren’t going to benefit from the federal loans and grants."
Kaplan, a Democrat from Great Neck who served four years in the Senate, recalled that the administration of then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and others had proposed a state tax credit to help small companies to recover from the pandemic. But she said she lobbied for the grant because with economic conditions so dire many firms wouldn’t be around in 12 months to use the tax credit.
Responding to the lukewarm reception given to the grant program by small business owners, Kaplan and others successfully pushed Cuomo’s successor, Kathy Hochul, to expand eligibility. The revenue cap was raised from $500,000 to $2.5 million per year and companies with PPP loans totaling $250,000 or less were permitted to apply, up from the previous limit of $100,000 or less.
A key difference between New York's grant program and the federal government's PPP was the grant amount was derived from an applicant's yearly revenue and the PPP loan amount was derived from the number of people employed by the applicant. As a result, the grant was larger than the loan in some instances.
That was the case for Dr. Nicholas Tucci, a general dentist with an office in Manhasset.
His grant was $44,472, or about double the amount of his first PPP loan for $24,536. Later, he won a second PPP loan for the identical amount, according to data from the U.S. Small Business Administration.
The grant amount was based on the dental practice’s 2019 revenue, which Tucci estimated to be $450,000. The loan was based on the size of the practice’s workforce, which consisted of the dentist, who worked full-time, and up to four part-time employees.
"The fact that the grant amount is based on the decline in revenue [between 2019 and 2020] is a big deal for businesses like Nicholas’ practice that don’t have a large head count," said Tucci’s wife, Angela Macropoulos, who works as an attorney and helped him to apply for pandemic relief.
Tucci, as an essential worker, was permitted to keep his dental office open to provide emergency treatments during the economic lockdown. He said he continued to pay his employees’ wages, monthly rent of $4,000 and between $15,000 and $20,000 for COVID precautions, such as three air filters and a sophisticated protective screen for the dental hygienist.
"Without the state grant, which was 26% of all the [relief] money that I got, I would have been pushed out of business," said Tucci, who has been a dentist for over 35 years. "I had no income but still had overhead expenses to pay. This grant saved my office."
Microbusinesses, such as Tucci’s practice, were uppermost in the minds of the officials at Empire State Development, the state's primary business-aid agency, when they created the all-electronic application process. The officials streamlined the application form, opened a call center to answer questions, translated program information into 15 languages and requested federal income tax returns to prevent fraud.
"We tried to be as simple as possible," said Rafael Salaberrios, the agency’s senior vice president of small-business capital access. "If you showed a loss [in revenue in 2020 compared with 2019] then you were going to get a grant."
He said Lendistry, a small-business lender based in Los Angeles, was paid $35 million to administer the program. ESD also paid $10 million for the Small Business Development Centers, Entrepreneurship Assistance Centers and others to help business owners in completing the application process.
Asked about the prevalence of fraud, Salaberrios estimated that less than 1% of the $760 million in grant funds, or $6.8 million, were stolen. That’s minuscule compared with the fraud rates in the COVID EIDL and PPP programs, based on audits by the SBA’s Office of Inspector General.
"We are using the full power of the law to track down the folks who knowingly committed fraud," Salaberrios said, adding that ESD is working with the state attorney general’s office.
Four years ago, in Glen Cove, Peter Warzer saw the orders for his company’s audiovisual services disappear as corporate events, charity galas, golf tournaments, awards shows and other mass gatherings were canceled due to the economic lockdown.
"It became apparent that all that business was going to die so I had to lay off everyone," he recalled, referring to Long Island Video Enterprises LIVE Inc.’s five employees and about a dozen freelance technicians.
Fortunately, the company landed two large contracts after having no work for a couple of months. One contract was for staging a virtual graduation ceremony at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point while the other was for 30 days of AV services, including video walls, at the Marriott Hotel in Uniondale, which at the time was lodging tennis players who were competing in the U.S. Open in Queens.
Warzer, Long Island Video’s president and founder, said he brought back employees and paid rent and utility bills with $73,800 from two PPP loans and a COVID EIDL grant. The 40-year-old company also secured a $150,000 EIDL loan.
In fall 2020, Long Island Video received several contracts for virtual Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at local synagogues.
"But our business was still significantly reduced in 2021 [compared with before the pandemic], so when I saw the advertisement for the state program I decided to apply," Warzer said. "We still had to pay the rent and other expenses," including major repairs to a truck.
Long Island Video is among 905 local small businesses and for-profit arts groups that received the maximum grant amount of $50,000, or 20% of all grantees, according to the Newsday analysis.
Orders for AV services have picked up with the return of public events, but COVID isn’t in the rearview mirror, said sales vice president Lori Sofolarides, who has been with the company since 1989.
"I have to have backup technicians waiting in the wings in case someone gets sick," she said. "We cannot take a chance on not having crew to operate our gear. Our clients are relying on us to ensure their events go smoothly."
Nearly 4,600 small businesses and for-profit arts groups on Long Island received a total of $111 million in state grants to bounce back from the pandemic, according to a Newsday analysis of new data.
More than 96% of the beneficiaries of New York State’s marquee business-relief program — the $800 million COVID-19 Pandemic Small Business Recovery Grant Program — were the smallest employers with 10 or fewer people on their payroll.
Many were based in homes or owned by women and members of minority groups, the analysis shows.
For some, the New York grant program, which started in summer 2021, arrived in the nick of time as they had used up earlier help from the federal government: Paycheck Protection Program loans and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loans. Others had missed out on that relief and were hanging on by a thread, according to entrepreneurs and their advocates.
"The state grants helped them stay afloat," said Michael Genova, a business adviser specializing in disaster relief at the Small Business Development Center at Farmingdale State College.
"A lot of businesses were helped [because] they now had money to take care of their employees, to keep their staff for when the pandemic was over," he said, recalling the worker shortage that followed COVID's worst years. "Other businesses hadn’t gotten any help before receiving the state grant."
The grant amounts ranged from $5,000 to $50,000 depending on the applicant’s gross receipts in 2019 before the virus struck. The funds could be used for costs incurred between March 2020 and April 2021, including employee wages, rent or mortgage payments, insurance, utility bills, taxes and COVID precautions such as masks, gloves and air filters.
Genova and the late Patty LeBas, another business adviser specializing in disaster relief, were assigned to help new clients of the SBDC-Farmingdale in determining which pandemic-relief programs they were eligible for and how to apply. The center assisted about 1,000 businesses during the crisis.
When the state grants become available, the SBDC-Farmingdale publicized them via email and social media.
When the email message landed in Jennifer Ackerson’s inbox in June 2021 her consulting business, Alon Tourism Solutions in Farmingdale, had been closed for 15 months. She recalled thinking that Alon wasn’t eligible for the state assistance and only applied in December 2021.
The $43,309 grant "gave me peace of mind during the very difficult time of rebuilding my business with so many unknowns," said Ackerson, who assists and trains U.S. tourist destinations, hotels, restaurants, shops and others to work with international tour operators.
Employees laid off
Jennifer Ackerson, founder and president of Alon Tourism Solutions in her home office in Farmingdale. Credit: Rick Kopstein
With countries closing their borders in March 2020 to slow the coronavirus’ spread, Alon was forced to shut down and lay off its five employees. Ackerson went on unemployment and paid bills with two PPP loans totaling $101,525 and a COVID-19 EIDL grant and loan of $29,000. She wasn’t eligible for forgiveness of the PPP loans because she had let her employees go.
"Our industry was completely shut down and there was no guarantee that we were going to be successful again, that visitors from overseas would come to America again," Ackerson said. "We made it through [the pandemic] but it could have gone the other way."
She said she used the state money to participate in a key trade show and to hire a second employee after Alon reopened in November 2021. The 24-year-old company now has eight employees and about $750,000 in yearly revenue.
"I’m doing better than I ever have and I’m grateful for all the help that I received," Ackerson said, adding the state grant program "allowed us small guys to survive."
Alon is among 3,037 small businesses and for-profit arts organizations in Nassau County that secured state funding, or 66% of the region’s total. In Suffolk County, 1,552 were helped, according to the analysis of data obtained under the state's Freedom of Information Law.
About half the entities that completed and submitted the grant application won a share of the $760 million that was distributed statewide. Applicants from Long Island, as a group, received the second-most funding after the $520 million garnered by New York City applicants.
Still, the average grant amount was larger on the Island than statewide: $24,188 vs. $18,608, the analysis shows.
"Every program that we start we do question whether it will reach the people that we want it to reach," said Anna Kaplan, who pushed for the grant program’s creation in spring 2021 when she led the state Senate’s small business and economic development committee.
"It’s most gratifying to hear that microbusinesses with 10 or fewer employees were the beneficiaries," she said. "I really did advocate very, very hard to put money in the [2021-22 state] budget for small businesses because I knew many of them weren’t going to benefit from the federal loans and grants."
Kaplan, a Democrat from Great Neck who served four years in the Senate, recalled that the administration of then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and others had proposed a state tax credit to help small companies to recover from the pandemic. But she said she lobbied for the grant because with economic conditions so dire many firms wouldn’t be around in 12 months to use the tax credit.
Responding to the lukewarm reception given to the grant program by small business owners, Kaplan and others successfully pushed Cuomo’s successor, Kathy Hochul, to expand eligibility. The revenue cap was raised from $500,000 to $2.5 million per year and companies with PPP loans totaling $250,000 or less were permitted to apply, up from the previous limit of $100,000 or less.
Based on yearly revenue
Dr. Nicholas Tucci received a grant from New York state during COVID, which helped his Manhassat dental practice stay in business. His wife, Angela Macropoulos, helped him complete the application. Credit: Ed Quinn
A key difference between New York's grant program and the federal government's PPP was the grant amount was derived from an applicant's yearly revenue and the PPP loan amount was derived from the number of people employed by the applicant. As a result, the grant was larger than the loan in some instances.
That was the case for Dr. Nicholas Tucci, a general dentist with an office in Manhasset.
His grant was $44,472, or about double the amount of his first PPP loan for $24,536. Later, he won a second PPP loan for the identical amount, according to data from the U.S. Small Business Administration.
The grant amount was based on the dental practice’s 2019 revenue, which Tucci estimated to be $450,000. The loan was based on the size of the practice’s workforce, which consisted of the dentist, who worked full-time, and up to four part-time employees.
"The fact that the grant amount is based on the decline in revenue [between 2019 and 2020] is a big deal for businesses like Nicholas’ practice that don’t have a large head count," said Tucci’s wife, Angela Macropoulos, who works as an attorney and helped him to apply for pandemic relief.
Tucci, as an essential worker, was permitted to keep his dental office open to provide emergency treatments during the economic lockdown. He said he continued to pay his employees’ wages, monthly rent of $4,000 and between $15,000 and $20,000 for COVID precautions, such as three air filters and a sophisticated protective screen for the dental hygienist.
"Without the state grant, which was 26% of all the [relief] money that I got, I would have been pushed out of business," said Tucci, who has been a dentist for over 35 years. "I had no income but still had overhead expenses to pay. This grant saved my office."
Microbusinesses, such as Tucci’s practice, were uppermost in the minds of the officials at Empire State Development, the state's primary business-aid agency, when they created the all-electronic application process. The officials streamlined the application form, opened a call center to answer questions, translated program information into 15 languages and requested federal income tax returns to prevent fraud.
"We tried to be as simple as possible," said Rafael Salaberrios, the agency’s senior vice president of small-business capital access. "If you showed a loss [in revenue in 2020 compared with 2019] then you were going to get a grant."
He said Lendistry, a small-business lender based in Los Angeles, was paid $35 million to administer the program. ESD also paid $10 million for the Small Business Development Centers, Entrepreneurship Assistance Centers and others to help business owners in completing the application process.
Low fraud rate
Asked about the prevalence of fraud, Salaberrios estimated that less than 1% of the $760 million in grant funds, or $6.8 million, were stolen. That’s minuscule compared with the fraud rates in the COVID EIDL and PPP programs, based on audits by the SBA’s Office of Inspector General.
"We are using the full power of the law to track down the folks who knowingly committed fraud," Salaberrios said, adding that ESD is working with the state attorney general’s office.
Peter Warzer, president and founder of Long Island Video Enterprises LIVE Inc., and Lori Sofolarides, the company's vice president of sales, at the Crest Hollow Country Club in Woodbury before an awards ceremony in late July. Credit: Rick Kopstein
Four years ago, in Glen Cove, Peter Warzer saw the orders for his company’s audiovisual services disappear as corporate events, charity galas, golf tournaments, awards shows and other mass gatherings were canceled due to the economic lockdown.
"It became apparent that all that business was going to die so I had to lay off everyone," he recalled, referring to Long Island Video Enterprises LIVE Inc.’s five employees and about a dozen freelance technicians.
Fortunately, the company landed two large contracts after having no work for a couple of months. One contract was for staging a virtual graduation ceremony at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point while the other was for 30 days of AV services, including video walls, at the Marriott Hotel in Uniondale, which at the time was lodging tennis players who were competing in the U.S. Open in Queens.
Warzer, Long Island Video’s president and founder, said he brought back employees and paid rent and utility bills with $73,800 from two PPP loans and a COVID EIDL grant. The 40-year-old company also secured a $150,000 EIDL loan.
In fall 2020, Long Island Video received several contracts for virtual Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at local synagogues.
"But our business was still significantly reduced in 2021 [compared with before the pandemic], so when I saw the advertisement for the state program I decided to apply," Warzer said. "We still had to pay the rent and other expenses," including major repairs to a truck.
Long Island Video is among 905 local small businesses and for-profit arts groups that received the maximum grant amount of $50,000, or 20% of all grantees, according to the Newsday analysis.
Orders for AV services have picked up with the return of public events, but COVID isn’t in the rearview mirror, said sales vice president Lori Sofolarides, who has been with the company since 1989.
"I have to have backup technicians waiting in the wings in case someone gets sick," she said. "We cannot take a chance on not having crew to operate our gear. Our clients are relying on us to ensure their events go smoothly."
James T. Madore writes about Long Island business news including the economy, development, and the relationship between government and business. He previously served as Albany bureau chief.
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