Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar (FL-27) and Congresswoman Sharice Davids (KS-03) on March 3 introduced the COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loan Relief Act (H.R. 1533) alongside Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25), Rep. Angie Craig (MN-02), and Rep. Dan Meuser (PA-09). This bipartisan bill extends the time to repay Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) loans, taken in response to COVID-19, for an extra year since the COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing. Extending the repayment timeframe for EIDL loans would be crucial for hoteliers still in financial distress from COVID-related expenses and revenue losses.
“Many of our local job creators applied for EIDL loans at the beginning of the outbreak and yet the pandemic has continued to take a devastating toll on our small businesses,” Congresswoman Salazar told HOTELS. “We cannot force our struggling small business owners to repay these loans at a time when many are barely able to keep their doors open. This bill provides our local job creators, including many hotels with less than 500 employees, with an extra year before they have to make their first loan repayments.”
Congresswoman Salazar, who represents Florida’s 27th Congressional district, which includes most of the City of Miami, its suburbs and the beaches, will be a keynote speaker on March 31 at HOTELS Opportunities Conference at the Mandarin Oriental Miami. For more information and to register for the event, click here.
Currently, EIDL loan recipients must start paying their loans back after one year. When business owners initially drew these loans in response to the COVID-19 disaster, no one anticipated that we would still be facing a global pandemic a year later. Now the first payments of many loan recipients are due in March and April of 2021, but many local job creators have not been able to grow or recover while the pandemic is still raging. This extension is critical so that small business owners who took out a loan during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic do not have to start making payments until at least 2022.
However, a survey last year by the American Hotel & Lodging Association found that while only about 12.4% of its members said they got an EIDL loan, the issue for many members was that they were not allowed to take EIDL loans. Often, their existing lenders prevented them from doing so because of the additional debt load associated with the loans.
“For almost one year now, the coronavirus pandemic has devastated our communities, and especially the futures of our small businesses,” Representative Davids added. “Even with the vaccine rollout speeding up, the pandemic is far from over, and our small businesses need all the help they can get to make it through. I’m proud to introduce this legislation with Rep. Salazar to delay repayment on EIDL loans for the small businesses that form the backbone of our community and economy.”