HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Hutchinson Reno County Chamber of Commerce says the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, has been successful in the area.
"The majority of the businesses that we have talked to have had a really great experience with the Paycheck Protection Program," Chamber President Debra Teufel said. "I would attribute that mostly to the fact that all of our lenders got right to work straight out of the gate when PPP was announced to make sure they were serving their customers."
Teufel says there were a few glitches with people who didn't qualify or didn't get in early enough, but said, for the most part, a large number of those who qualified for PPP did get funded.
As far as needs per capita, the state was ranked third out of 50 with only Nebraska and North Dakota ranking higher. It shows that 78% of the small businesses in Kansas are eligible for assistance. During the first 13 days of the small business rescue, the state received $4.3 billion. Some 26,200 loans have been approved in Kansas. Teufel says that area lenders have been busy and estimated that about 1,000 local businesses have taken advantage of the program.
"I'm going to guesstimate that we've had about 1,000 businesses in Reno County that have qualified, or at least in the Reno County area in that they had a Reno County lender," Teufel noted. "I talked to numerous banks. Some of them submitted upwards of 300 applications, some in the 200 to 250, another bank I talked to submitted 90 and then you start getting down to some of the smaller banks as well."
Congress is working to get another round of funding out with the hope that more small businesses will be able to take more advantage of the funding rather than some of the larger companies that dove through loopholes to take a piece of the pie.
"As late as last Friday we hosted a webinar with the accounting firms in our area to continue to educate our proprietors and independent contractors on how they can qualify for PPP," Teufel said. "We hope that there's another allocation coming soon and we wanted people to be prepared."
If businesses didn't see that webinar, they can still access it on the Chamber's Youtube page.