Task force looks at economic impact of COVID-19 on local business

PALMER — Mat-Su Borough Assemblywoman Stephanie Nowers led a task force to determine the economic impact of the COVID-19 on businesses in the Mat-Su Borough that was announced during one of the early COVID-19 press conferences held by the Mat-Su Borough. Publishing the results of the study on Thursday, the economic impact survey provided to business owners yielded 1,605 responses from local business owners about how business has changed since the global pandemic reached Alaska.

The Mat-Su Borough has over 8,000 businesses and the most significant economic effects felt by local businesses were in tourism, retail, childcare, and food service industries. Survey respondents were asked how many employees they had, how reliant they were on visitors from outside Alaska, if they had applied for aid funding, how their business had been affected during the pandemic and what they might expect if business were not to turn around. The Mat-Su Borough produced an interactive dashboard that is able to select the zipcode and specific industry to view the dashboard through.

“It is small businesses that have been left behind. There has been federal stimulus checks for individuals, and bigger businesses have the capacity to take advantages of those programs. We have a lot of small businesses in the Borough, 80% are 5 employees or less. We knew that CoViD was affecting them, we all had anecdotal stories to tell, but this was our opportunity to show how they were being impacted,” said Nowers.

Out of 1,605 respondents, 45 percent of businesses reported a loss of more than half their revenues thus far during the pandemic. More than half (55 percent) of respondents said that they are reliant on visitors from outside Alaska. Of that 55 percent, 22 percent said that they were 75 percent reliant on business from visitors from outside Alaska and only 45 percent responded that none of their income comes from tourists.