The Kenai Peninsula Economic Development District (KPEDD) is in the process of working on an economic resiliency plan for the Kenai Peninsula Borough. In recent years, the Kenai Peninsula economy has been challenged by a series of unanticipated shocks that ultimately impacted households and employers in the region. Of the greatest magnitude is the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to tremendous job losses and business closures. In addition, the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that hit Southcentral Alaska in 2018, the 2019 Swan Lake Fire, and the recent volatility of oil prices.
KPEDD’s Executive Director, Tim Dillon, says that he recently met with the Deputy Secretary of Commerce and discussed how this resiliency plan helps in taking action to anticipate and respond to these challenges:
“He looked me in the eye saying, ‘Tim, have you guys learned anything from it?’ I said, ‘Oh yeah’. He said, ‘Like what?’ I started going through some of the different things that we had learned from our businesses and what was going well and what wasn’t going well. He said, ‘What would you do with that?’ I said that if we had the right amount of money, we would go and create opportunities for small businesses to learn and understand from those. We were given a contract by the federal government to go ahead and write a resiliency plan for here on the Kenai Peninsula.”
Dillon said the biggest example is business licenses:
“We learned through COVID that because of the way things were structured, we had 30-plus businesses that did not qualify for Alaska CARES and the reason they didn’t qualify for Alaska CARES is they didn’t have a business license. As we drilled down to figure out why they didn’t have a business license, every single one of them was in an unincorporated community.”
Dillon says that KPEDD is working on ways to help individuals find and determine their needs through a virtual checklist of sorts. One of those ways includes videos posted to their YouTube channel as well as interactive online programs. By the end of June, the hope is to have six completed that will help individuals around the Kenai Peninsula.
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resiliency
