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Commerce Department Shares List of ‘Ready for Business’ Grant Recipients

2 min read

The Arkansas Department of Commerce on Tuesday released a spreadsheet of the 10,537 businesses that have been approved for Arkansas Ready for Business grants totaling more than $115 million.

Arkansas Business requested the list and sorted the spreadsheet from largest grant eligibility to smallest, although a number of businesses requested less than the maximum for which they were eligible. The maximum available to any one business is $100,000, and 202 businesses qualified for that amount.

Get the spreadsheet: Excel format | CSV format

More than half of the amount approved has been deposited into bank accounts, according to Alisha Curtis, the department’s chief communications and legislative director. The remainder should be processed by the end of the week, she said.

Originally limited to $15 million and complicated by what the governor called a “premature” rollout on April 29, the Ready for Business program received a total of 12,234 applications for the $147.7 million the legislature ultimately allocated. The Commerce Department also released the following statistics:

  • 201 applications were withdrawn or the business was determined to be ineligible;
  • 7,968 grants were released for payment as of Tuesday;
  • 2,569 were approved for payment subject to submitting missing paperwork;
  • 1,496 applications have not yet been approved and are not included on the spreadsheet. Of those, 979 cannot be cleared by the Department of Finance & Administration because of a known tax delinquency or because the company is not in DF&A’s system; and 517 applications were still under review as of Tuesday.

Under the program, led by the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, businesses can receive $1,000 per employee and up to $100,000 total. They can use the money to buy supplies including personal protective equipment, no-contact thermometers, no-contact point-of-sale payment equipment, cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer stations. At least 15% of grant recipients must be women- or minority-owned businesses.

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