Nearly seven months after a Bouquet Canyon Road closure made Plum Canyon business owners fret for their future, the Santa Clarita City Council is expected to discuss how it can help at Tuesday’s meeting.
In November 2020, the city of Santa Clarita authorized a shutdown of Bouquet Canyon Road from north of Plum Canyon, which some owners considered a lifeline to their businesses, to facilitate a floodplain expansion for the construction of a Lennar housing project nearby.
When the work actually began in February, and the road closed, residents and business owners shared numerous concerns about the city’s outreach and traffic plan, with many asking how the businesses at Canyon Center on Bouquet and the Plum Canyon shopping center would survive.
A handful of local proprietors have said the closure of Bouquet Canyon and a gate at Benz Road make survival nearly impossible.
Pallets of unsold products have been tossed at one location. Another actively looked at other shopping centers. One mentioned seeking an emergency loan, but concerns over whether the work will finish on time could create another quandary.
The city staff asked residents to reach out to several organizations, including the Small Business Development Center, the Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce and the SCV Economic Development Corp., but local proprietors said no help was available.
More than one City Council member put the question to the city’s staff: Shouldn’t Lennar help out, if it stands to gain millions of dollars from the project?
City Manager Ken Striplin has not received a call back from Lennar regarding assistance for the businesses, according to city officials
That finally prompted the City Council in July to order staff to look into the city’s coffers to see how it could help.
The solution the staff came up with involves a one-time transfer of $640,000 from a contingency account — with a proviso that more might be necessary — in order to fund a grant program and pay a third-party administrator to run it.
“City staff developed a proposed Bouquet Canyon Business Assistance Grant Program,” according to the staff report for Tuesday’s meeting, which is intended to provide “temporary, prospective financial assistance to eligible businesses experiencing documented economic hardship during the Bouquet Canyon Road closure.”
The proposed program doesn’t compensate businesses for previously lost revenue, but instead plans to use demonstrated revenue decline to measure economic hardship and determine the appropriate level of prospective assistance for anticipated future losses.
As a condition of assistance, grant recipients would need to stay open for a minimum of two years following the disbursal of any grant funds.
The program requires a business to have been in operation for at least 12 months prior to the closure, which could disqualify a business that opened just months before the closure.
“These provisions are intended to ensure that financial assistance is directly connected to the public purpose established in the attached resolution,” according to the city staff report.
“An eligible business demonstrating economic hardship associated with the Bouquet Canyon Road closure may receive a grant to support continued operations. Grant awards may provide up to 50% of eligible fixed operating expenses for a six-month period, not to exceed $35,000 per business.”
The applicable grant percentage would be based on the business’ demonstrated revenue decline, based on a chart the city staff provided in its agenda.
Mik Prajapati, the owner of a mail and shipping center at Bouquet and Plum, has spoken out at multiple City Council meetings about the hardships of the closure, which happened not long after his business opened.
He said the city has been “almost too silent” since he spoke with Mayor Laurene Weste at a July pop-up event the city hosted, when she promised the city would deliver a program that would help. He was not aware of Tuesday’s discussion when reached by phone Thursday afternoon, shortly after the agenda was posted.
“Absolutely, I will be there,” he said of Tuesday’s meeting.
