Governor Tate Reeves announced the launch of the backtobusinessms.org website at his weekly news briefing. He’s urging small business owners to review eligibility requirements for federal coronavirus relief grants provided to Mississippi.
“Small businesses with less than 50 employees can get up to $25,000 to offset the cost to their business caused by this pandemic. It has frequently asked questions and information that you might need,” said Reeves.
Reeves says Mississippi Development Authority is reviewing bids to hire a company to administer the $300 million grant program. Why does the state need a company to manage the program? Reeves says there aren’t enough employees at the agency to handle the size of it and the list of federal guidelines involved in distributing the grants.
“When we have a new program that is funded by the federal government that is requiring tens of thousands of checks and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to be distributed to do it in a very quick way, we have to scale up quickly. And no we don’t have enough lawyers in state government and no we don’t have enough employees sitting around that can flip that switch,” said Reeves.
Reeves says the program is being started from scratch. He’s hoping the applications are available online this week and expects some challenges getting it up and running. The grants are part of the $1.25 billion in federal CARE Act relief money.
