City seeks to offer ‘guidance’, help business recovery in Hamilton after COVID-19

A task force is in the works to help guide the recovery of Hamilton’s business community in the months ahead.

City council has approved the creation of the Mayor’s Task Force on Economic Recovery.

Hamilton Mayor Fred Eisenberger says the idea is to provide “guidance” on issues ranging from financing and re-establishing their customer base to staffing and supply chain disruptions, rather than having “individual businesses try to figure that out by themselves.”

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Eisenberger says personal protective equipment will be another big challenge for businesses as they get back up and running.

“They’re likely all going to require protective devices, screens and a number of different practices to be able to manage their businesses,” Eisenberger said.

The economic recovery task force will be guided, in part, by a recently-completed survey of about 750 local businesses and how they’ve individually been affected by COVID-19.

General Manager of Planning and Economic Development Jason Thorne says they’ve just started tabulating the results to questions that ranged from “impact on labor force, impact on wages, impact on revenues.”

He says the idea was to get a sense of the “trends and pressures.”

The mayor adds that separate process is in the works to address the needs of the non-profit sector, organizations that aren’t able to raise funds right now and are “struggling to keep going.”