The “Shop Here All Year in Kenai” program kicks off today and goes through April 1.
It involves around $335,000 in direct incentives to shoppers to shop locally from February 1 to April 1. Originally, the program was set to include around $100,000 and only last for one month. It will utilize city funds to encourage shoppers around the area to shop in Kenai with exchange vouchers for qualifying purchases of discretionary items.
The goal is to provide economic relief and stimulus to Kenai small businesses, as well as assistance to residents purchasing goods and services by incentivizing local discretionary purchases. In simple terms, if you make qualified purchases in Kenai during the program’s run, you can save receipts and redeem them with the Kenai Chamber of Commerce for vouchers to shop locally in participating Kenai businesses.
City Manager Paul Ostrander offered details to KSRM, “We’ve got a program, $335,000 that goes directly towards vouchers and $15,000 for administration. It runs from February 1st until April 1st, or the end of March. The vouchers would have to be spent by the end of April. The intent of these programs was to try to provide funding for small businesses that were impacted the greatest amount by COVID. The essentials, people certainly focused on those, but the businesses that don’t provide those essential non-discretionary items, that would be restaurants or small stores that maybe provide or sell some type of items that would be considered discretionary, those types of stores were impacted significantly through COVID because people very much focused on purchasing the essentials. The focus of the program was very much to try to provide funding for those businesses that were impacted the most by COVID-19.”
Ostrander also told KSRM that this is likely not the last we see of programs of this nature in Kenai, “Based on my conversations with council, they know that the city reaching out and helping those in our community that need it the most, they are not done doing that. They are very focused on making sure they can identify who needs the money the most and making sure that they can help those folks make it through this.”
More information on the program can be found here.
