During its meeting last Tuesday, the Edinburg City Council approved a Small Business Loan Program with LiftFund, a local nonprofit organization that provides loans to underserved business owners.
The organization has partnered with local governments, such as McAllen for eight years and Corpus Christi for 11 years, to equip young entrepreneurs with an interest buy down program, which offers borrowers reduced-interest loans.
The Edinburg Economic Development Corp. and the city will provide a total of $100,000 for the program. The city will supply $50,000 of funds received from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. The EEDC will supply another $50,000, according to agenda documents.
“With a $100,000 interest buy down participation through the City and EEDC, LiftFund can disburse $450,000 in capital loans to up to nine (9) small businesses with an average loan amount of $50,000 at a 2.5% interest rate,” the documents state. “The number of small businesses may vary depending on the loan amounts.”
In an interview with The Rider last Thursday, Nelda Ramirez, Edinburg assistant city manager, said the city is moving forward with this program to lower the loan interest rate from 8% or 9% to 2.5%.
“So it makes it more cost effective for them to be able to obtain funds that they need [to] pay back on a loan, but the interest rate is a lot, a lot lower than it normally would be,” Ramirez said.
Mayor Ramiro Garza Jr. asked Ramirez to focus on small businesses on East University Drive around the Hidalgo County Courthouse since they will “be affected during the construction or reconstruction of [State Highway] 107 because there’s drainage going to be put in there.”
“If there’s a way to target those areas, a lot of the small businesses, you know, I think they’re going to need a little bit of help and I think this program may help them,” Garza said.
The mayor also said he will be asking the EEDC board to increase next year’s amount offered by the city so that more small businesses have access to the program.
Marlene R. Rodriguez, LiftFund senior business development officer, said the organization has already begun to reach out to the Small Business Administration for a community walk-through to inform small business owners about the program.
LiftFund will administer the loans and will provide business owners with several services, including program design and promotion, demographic and impact reporting and website design.
The Small Business Loan Program will start in about two weeks and will last for a 12-month period, Ramirez said.
The Edinburg Police Department gave a presentation on the launch of Socrata Citizen Connect, a map site created to inform and alert visitors and residents of police activities, such as minor accidents, in a specific area.
Police Chief Jaime Ayala clarified what a minor accident entails as he said it is a call for service, such as a person calling the police regarding loud music or a suspicious person in the area.
Ayala told The Rider during an interview last Thursday that the site will also track reported car crashes in an area.
“There are some crimes, some offenses that you won’t see on there, sex crimes, some drug offenses, some of the information that we just don’t need to be putting out in the map, but for the most part, everything that somebody would be really interested in is going to be available for them to search,” he said during the council meeting.
Carla Bautista, a crime analyst for the Police Department, said the site will be updated every 15 minutes and users have access to obtain daily, weekly and monthly reports via email, if desired.
“The activity occurring in the neighborhood and the transparency that we are projecting is to give members of the community or members that moved to Edinburg the ability to look at what crimes are happening in their neighborhood,” Ayala told The Rider.
During the meeting, he said the site might be available as early as today to the public and will appear as a link on the city’s website.
