The Kenai Shop Local program, which began at the beginning of the month has been growing in popularity by people wanting to receive vouchers to spend at local participating businesses.
Brittany Brown, Executive Director at the Kenai Chamber of Commerce provided an update to the Kenai City Council Wednesday night. She said, “We signed up 50 participating small businesses ranging from restaurants and boutiques to day spas and appliance stores with multiple calls in the last few days on how businesses can get signed up. We’re working and anticipating that more businesses will come through over the next week or so. We started the process of actually reaching out to businesses that we know in particular are eligible for this program. Of course, there’s some stipulations of the business license being active up and being up to date on your Kenai Peninsula Borough sales tax. In the same two weeks, we’ve had over 240 participants who have turned in receipts to receive their vouchers. As of 4:00 p.m. today, we have administered 128 $100 vouchers and 18 $50 vouchers to qualifying participants. When we tally that up, this equates to a total of $20,200 of direct incentives to participating small businesses. Each week, participating businesses who have been chosen for the vouchers are paid out. In just the first week of the program, $13,200 were paid out to businesses.”
The heavily marketed program garnered the most attention through a video shared to the Kenai Chamber of Commerce’s Facebook page.
In a related story, a public hearing was held last night to deliberate an ordinance increasing revenues and appropriations to provide assistance to those impacted by the COVID-19 public health emergency with the purchase of groceries and necessary household goods and award a professional service agreement to the Kenai Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Center for the Administration of the program. It was unanimously enacted as amended.