Lee on tracking small businesses and incentive program efficacy
Lee asks if EDC tracks small business numbers and analyzes REAP and RACE incentive efficacy. Peck says they track usage and analyze results through their strategy group, offering to share data.
May 2024 report titled New York City Small Business Recovery, Patterns of Growth in a Changing Economy, showed that at the time, New York State had over 183
thousand small businesses more than ever before and showed substantial recovery from the drop seen during COVID.
And over the last two years, economies have changed drastically on the local, national, and global levels.
And so do you track the number of small businesses located in the city?
If not, is that something that the corporation is willing to track?
And if yes, what is the current number of small businesses and what are the trends that you're seeing?
I'll have to get back to you if we track those small businesses.
And if we don't, we can look into tracking them.
We do work very closely with SBS as well as we are very focused on small business.
They're sort of the backbone of the economy here.
And they are good work, you know, paying jobs for people.
And what we do is we have programs to promote small business and support small businesses, but we also use our assets to tenant out for small businesses specifically.
So, for example, for Brooklyn Army Terminal, many of those small business are manufacturing and industrial companies.
And we...
are very focused on ensuring that we provide them tenant space.
Okay, great.
And just my last questions around revenue.
Do you conduct any analysis on the efficacy of incentive programs like race and rebond tax revenue for the city?
We do track, I think, the usage.
I have to go back to you exactly, but we do track on sort of, like, we look backwards and see, like, how many companies use Raise a Reap,
where they, what those companies were, to see if people are using it and what they're using it for and where it's, like, successful or not.
Yes, we have a strategy group that does all of that analysis.
Okay, and have you considered expanding existing marketing, business attraction for these programs?
So we were involved in sort of advising City Hall on sort of potential incentive programs, and so we'll continue to play that role.
We haven't done it, like, recently, but we continue to play that role with City Hall.