{"id":71421,"date":"2025-03-17T14:12:45","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T21:12:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=71421"},"modified":"2025-03-17T14:12:45","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T21:12:45","slug":"la-county-launches-help-for-small-businesses-after-fires-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=71421","title":{"rendered":"LA County Launches Help for Small Businesses After Fires, Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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With minority-owned Los Angeles businesses taking a double-hit of the pandemic and recent fires, the county is stepping up help.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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With minority-owned Los Angeles businesses taking a double-hit of the pandemic and recent fires, the county is stepping up help.<\/p>\n

LA County houses approximately\u00a01,397,434<\/a>\u00a0small businesses, comprising nearly 99.96% of all businesses in the county \u2014 with more of these being women- and minority-owned than any other U.S. county.<\/p>\n

To help these businesses recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 2025 wildfires, the county Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) has launched new programs including relief funds, legal aid, insurance navigation help, unemployment insurance extensions, a space-sharing site, and support for sidewalk vendors and home-based kitchens.<\/p>\n

\u201cSmall businesses and entrepreneurs are the backbone of the LA County economy,\u201d said DEO Director Kelly LoBianco. \u201cThey provide essential goods and services. They provide spaces for communities to convene \u2026 but in the last 60 days, there has been devastation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fires wreaked up to $275 billion in damages, with nearly 1,900 small businesses within the burn zones and tens of thousands of people displaced from their homes.<\/p>\n

To help, DEO has extended unemployment and disaster unemployment insurance through March 31, with one-on-one\u00a0application<\/a>\u00a0help<\/p>\n

This resource, and all those to follow, are available with more details on the DEO\u00a0website<\/a>; by phone at 844-777-2059; by email at\u00a0deo@opportunity.lacounty.gov<\/a>; and in-person at the department office at 510 S. Vermont Avenue, east LA.<\/p>\n

Other help available includes one-stop permit help; emergency cash relief grants; daily multilingual business resource events and webinars; a free space-sharing web portal for businesses needing storefronts or kitchens.<\/p>\n

Pro bono legal aid including commercial lease agreements, employee safety, wages and benefits, contract negotiation, intellectual property, tax liability, entity structuring and bankruptcy is also available; get in touch\u00a0online<\/a>\u00a0or by phone at 866-375-9511.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn February 2024, the county also passed an ordinance creating a program, permit and workshops for sidewalk food and other vendors to come into the formal economy,\u201d said LoBianco. \u201cSimilarly, last November, we launched MEHKO, the Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations Ordinance, another pathway for vendors to grow their business in their own home kitchen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interested vendors can operate a home kitchen that also serves as a commissary space for up to two vending carts, and can serve up to 30 home cooked meals per day, up to 90 per week, in annual sales of $100,000.<\/p>\n

Public health webinars, permit help and funding aid \u2014 including first-year offset permit costs for 1,000 applicants through June 2026 \u2014 are available at the\u00a0MEHKO website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One beneficiary, Richard Gomez Trejo, owner of\u00a0WRAPS-TO-GOmeztrejo<\/a>, heard of the program while sharing food with coworkers in the break room] at his then-job as interior kitchen designer at a big-box store.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the start of the pandemic, my coworkers weren\u2019t ordering food like they normally could. And when I was in the break room, they\u2019d always comment: \u2018What smells so good?\u2019\u201d he explained. \u201cI started bringing pasta, ribs and hot wings to share. Then wraps. I\u2019m Hispanic, so a wrap isn\u2019t a huge leap \u2014 just an open ended burrito.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy tagline is: I\u2019m not a chef, I just make wraps. It\u2019s nothing serious,\u201d Trejo continued. \u201cMEHKO helped me turn my side hustle into something more. I got a food handler certificate, a permit \u2026 an inspector came to my house and approved my kitchen. It helped me build up my clientele. I say \u2018Look, guys, I\u2019m legitimate now,\u2019 and so they\u2019re more comfortable to place their orders and spread the word about me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re going to start a business, you have to have confidence, and you have to be consistent. I work as if someone\u2019s looking over my shoulder,\u201d he added. I\u2019m not going to cut corners. I have a lot of fun doing this, and the legal help I got allows me to sleep well at night.\u201d<\/p>\n

Extensive free legal help is also available through the\u00a0LA\/SoCal Small Business Development Center<\/a>\u00a0(SBDC).<\/p>\n

Before becoming regional director of the SBDC Patrick Nye worked as a climate change researcher in the Arctic for the U.S. Coast Guard, then worked in the brewing industry in Oregon, then worked in renewable energy PR.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very diverse resume, but a common thread is mission-related work, and that certainly lends itself toward the SBDC,\u201d he said. \u201cWe do two things \u2014 for one, provide daily training\u00a0workshops<\/a>\u00a0across all small business topics, mostly online and some in person.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMore importantly, we do one-on-one advising in 20 different languages to coach small businesses to start and grow,\u201d Nye continued. \u201cWe\u2019re federally funded, so these are your tax dollars and actions. We help you take advantage of all the resources \u2014 fedreal, state, local \u2014 that are available to help you get capital, contracts, plans, relocate, whatever you need \u2026 including disaster recovery like insurance and FEMA loans.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen disaster strikes, people rarely think about the invisible or indirect impacts,\u201d said Liana Austin, director of\u00a0Discovery World Early Education Center<\/a>, a south LA-based school that was] saved by free legal aid through the county.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne is that with a reduced amount of commercial spaces due to fires or lockdowns, rents and demand increase, and businesses face pressure or displacement from lease renegotiations and hidden terms,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

While DSW had a long-term lease in when their building was bought in 2022, that year, the new property owners \u201cadded $100,000 to our invoice one month, claiming that we owed them additional reimbursements for water utilities going back to 2006, when they only bought the property in 2022, we\u2019d already been paying for 18 years, their invoices didn\u2019t add up to the amount said and the statute of limitations passed anyway,\u201d said Austin.<\/p>\n

She had become founding director of the school to continue the now-35-year legacy of her founding mother; before this, Austin earned a degree in engineering and a certificate for early education and child care.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven with a more technical background, legal challenges can become a costly full-time job for a small business trying to enforce its rights, like under the lease,\u201d she said. In general, business owners are assumed to be savvy, so there\u2019s less protections. But we have to do almost everything. For example, I have a contractor\u2019s license so I can fix things.\u201d<\/p>\n

DEO\u00a0legal aid<\/a>\u00a0\u201csecured us with pro bono assistance with large firms to help with things like employment law compliance and reviewing documents, and smaller attorneys to help with the landlord,\u201d Austin continued. \u201cWith a small amount of work, they helped us a tremendous amount, like going to our licensing advocate with us, because our landlord was trying to relocate us to a space that would be unsuitable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNavigating the law is extremely complicated and nuanced, and there\u2019s this power imbalance between different players in the small business realm \u2026 you\u2019re battling a player that has a lot more power commercially than you do,\u201d she added. \u201cI encourage everyone to get this free help.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BySelen Ozturk Mar 17, 2025 With...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-ca-local"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71421"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71422,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71421\/revisions\/71422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}