How SeaTac’s standard business survey helped shape its pandemic relief plan.

By Laura Furr Americas

This past September, SeaTac’s city council approved a budget amendment that would dedicate nearly half of the city's $8 million American Rescue Act (ARPA) allotment to assisting local businesses.

“We were hearing that small businesses need help,” says SeaTac City Manager Carl Cole. “There were several programs before ARPA, but that money ran out, and it wasn’t enough to go around in the first place.”

Guided by the SeaTac Economic Development Division's Business Synergy Program, an annual outreach effort that in 2021 surveyed 142 businesses, the city will use $3.5 million in ARPA funding to address three critical needs.

First, the city will invest $1.8 million in developing its Regional FastTrack Childcare Initiative, which will provide start-up grants and mentorship to residents seeking to open home-based childcare enterprises. “It creates the businesses that were lost during the pandemic and an opportunity for the workforce to get back into working,” Cole explains.

SeaTac will also use $242,000 of its ARPA allotment to train business owners on how to sell online and support their efforts by creating a shared digital platform and a marketing campaign to drive users to local business websites; ARPA funds also will be used for digital literacy education and training on the new platform.

“Everybody started buying everything online and having it delivered to their home and a lot of businesses just weren’t set up to do that,” Cole adds. “And that seems to be sticking. There’s less of the brick and mortar sort of business happening now. We’re not ‘back.’ And so there’s still a high need for that digital marketplace.”

And lastly, $1.5 million will be added to the city's Small Business Capital Access Program Fund, which aims to boost businesses’ access to capital and create awareness of funding opportunities. (“Access to capital was a huge issue,” says Cole.) In its first year, the program will focus on promoting the state’s Small Business Flex Fund by working with other community organizations that specialize in such assistance.

“These three initiatives working together should improve our tax revenues over time, and that allows us to pay for parks and roads and all the other things that cities pay for,” Cole explains. “This really was a larger plan not just to help the small companies, the owners, and the employees, but also to provide sustainability for our city. We always had this goal in mind, but everybody had to push pause for 18 to 24 months, and then the needs dramatically changed.”

From the 2021 survey, the economic development team was able to glean specific information about how they could best support SeaTac’s diverse business community, factoring in cultural nuances and addressing language barriers by offering a multilingual loan application process.

“It’s super important to ask people,” Cole says. “We asked our business community, ‘What do you need?’” The city plans to coordinate a similar outreach program to determine how to use its remaining ARPA dollars by working with its community engagement specialist, Cole adds.

His advice for other city leaders? “Figure out what you need; address your needs. And don’t necessarily get too concerned about what’s happening over the fence.”

For more information: seatacwa.gov