April 24, 2020

I want to wish Ramadan Mubarak to all in Raleigh who are celebrating this month. I hope you and your family are able to find peace and happiness even in this difficult time. 

The Raleigh City Council held a special virtual city council meeting this week to provide support for small businesses and the housing insecure as we continue to deal with the impact of COVID-19 on our city. The council also moved to allow virtual neighborhood meetings for rezonings so that our residents can continue to remain engaged while staying at home during COVID-19.

To assist Raleigh’s housing insecure, the city began crafting a plan to provide rent, utility, and mortgage assistance as well as homelessness and eviction prevention for families below 30% of the area median income using CARES Act funding. The plan requires a public hearing that will take place on May 5^th. 

We also approved $1 million toward a grant fund to help Raleigh’s small businesses, as many have been unable to get immediate assistance from the federal government. Raleigh’s 33,000 small businesses are the cultural soul of our community and I’m proud and excited to step up to support them. Small businesses can learn more about the program here. We are working to open applications as soon as possible, and hope to have it up and running by May 5^th. Please continue to check the website daily for any updates. 

On Thursday, the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce held a call to request corporate support for the Raleigh Small Business Fund. We challenged them to match the $1 million from the city to further support our small business community. Thank you to the 44 corporate partners who joined us. If you are interested in helping (any dollar amount will be appreciated), please reach out to me or Adrienne Cole at the Chamber.

Yesterday, the Governor announced that our statewide stay-at-home order will be extended until at least May 8^th.  He also unveiled a phased plan to reopen our state. I fully support our Governor’s plan, which is driven by data and the advice of public health experts. The leaders of Wake County’s 12 municipalities will be discussing how to modify our own stay-at-home order next week. Before we begin a phased reopening, we need to greatly ramp up our testing and tracing capabilities and we need to see a real trend of decline in cases. We are just not there yet, but we can get there with our continued efforts to stay at home. We are doing the right thing and it’s working.