Lancaster businesses received more than $24.6 million in forgivable loans via the "Paycheck Protection Program"

 

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

The "Paycheck Protection Program" was a Federal Program that supported businesses during the COVID pandemic; it accepted applications in 2020 and 2021.   Businesses received federally-backed loans, but those loans could be forgiven if the loan was used to avoid payroll reductions during the crisis.  (The vast majority of the loans were used that way and have been forgiven.)

The program provided a lot of support to businesses in our area:  Lancaster businesses were approved for more then $24.6 million in loans.   The largest loans in Lancaster went to the Doctor Franklin Perkins school ($3.8 million), Monroe Wire and Cable ($1.8 million), and Ron Bouchard's Auto Sales ($3.7 million over two draws.)   Built-rite Tool and Die received $1.6 million, and D'Ambrosio Eye Care received $2.8 million over two draws.

Churches also received loans to encourage them to maintain their payrolls.  In Lancaster, the Immaculate Conception Parish received $38 thousand over two draws and the First Church of Christ received $27 thousand over two draws.   The Trivium School on Langen Road received $170 thousand over two draws. 

Of the soccer programs in town, FC Stars received $427 thousand.   Massachusetts Youth Soccer Association received $639 thousand over two draws.  They reported that they were supporting 72 and 49 jobs, respectively.

The Small Business Administration periodically made the data publicly available on it's website.  It was most recently published in July.     Here's the total approved for area municipalities:

Here's the data for individual businesses, filtered by municipality.   In some cases businesses were eligible to receive a second loan: the first and second draws are indicated as "PPP" and "PPS" respectively.

Source Data:
https://data.sba.gov/dataset/ppp-foia

I used the 7/3/2022 version of the data.   It's released as 13 ~400MB CSV files, which I pulled into MySQL and then into Tableau.   If you're interested in working with that data, here's a copy of the loading script I made for MySQL. (The 10th "up to 150k" file has the default escape character on record 8919, if you run into that.  I handled that in this loading script.)