When Mike Brady opened Pelican Jo’s Pizzeria in Windsor in 2011, money was so tight he couldn’t even afford a menu board. The country was battling back from the Great Recession, and getting a bank loan seemed impossible.
“If you walked into a bank and said you wanted to open a restaurant, it was like cockroaches when the lights went on,” he said.
Help came from a surprising source: the federal farm bill, which includes a pool of money to help improve the economic stability of rural communities and small towns across America.
In February 2012, Brady landed a $30,000 loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which got him through the rough business start.
“That made a huge difference,” he said. “Since then, we’ve tripled our volume and doubled our workforce.”
The farm bill, better known for funding things such as food stamps and farm subsidies, is also the rural bill. It funds the USDA Rural Development program — the so-called “venture capitalist for rural America” — which helps build or support such community essentials as fire stations, schools, libraries and medical clinics. More than $400 million flowed into Colorado in fiscal 2013.
“It’s critical to the fabric of rural Colorado,” said U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat in the Senate’s Agriculture Committee who also served on the Farm Bill Conference Committee. “This program enables people to have access to resources they’d otherwise not have.”
Entrepreneurs are important to rural life, and even tiny businesses are getting help. Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program, created in 2008, provides small loans to enterprises that have fewer than 10 employees and can’t get conventional credit.
“So many of our rural towns, particularly the one-stoplight towns, are (dominated) by small business,” said U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma. “The local grain operator and the hospital are usually the biggest (places), but the rest are businesses with one or two people.”
Many of the farm bill’s rural-development programs are designed to work with local banks in public-private partnerships, he said, and the “strong foundation” of a USDA loan or grant often attracts support from community businesses.
In Colorado, farm-bill funding for rural development has bolstered a range of resources, including a preschool in Bayfield, a domestic-abuse safehouse in Dillon and the Axis Health System in Cortez, which provides integrated health care services to people in Dolores and Montezuma counties.
Even the smallest amounts of money can make a huge difference.
The Milliken Fire Protection District received a $5,000 USDA grant that allowed it to buy a new 40-kilowatt generator — just installed in January — to keep systems running during a power outage.
When the power went out during a big snowstorm a few years ago, firefighters had to pull the manual release to get the bay doors open for the trucks to get out. Luckily, power didn’t go out during the September floods, when Milliken was an island surrounded by water for about five days and residents from mobile home parks had to be evacuated.
“If we’d have lost power, we would have been stuck,” said Fire Chief Ron Bateman. “Beyond getting the doors open for the trucks to get out, we need the ability to keep the engines charged up.”
Computers are essential in such emergencies, especially those in fire engines that help firefighters use mapping tools to get to a scene and to process new information when they arrive. Parked in the bay, the engines are plugged into a line to keep the batteries fully charged.
“That generator will allow us to run an emergency-operations center and command post,” said Bateman. “That is super important for a place as small as Milliken.”
In Summit County, financing from the USDA Rural Development program helped the nonprofit Advocates for Victims of Assault to purchase space for new offices and a new safehouse in Dillon for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
“We can serve more people,” legal advocate Lori Schiefen said. “We also have more storage space. Before, we didn’t have any way to store food, coats and toilet paper.”
“We are a resort community,” Schiefen said of Dillon, “so we have a lot of resort workers and families here, and also there’s a huge influx of people during the ski season. Domestic violence (also) happens when people are on vacation.”
Farm-bill funding also helped create the Haxtun Community Childcare Center, which has attracted more residents.
“People would take a job in town, then come to Haxtun and ask about day care, then not take the job,” said Christi Anne Gibson, a founding board member of the child-care center.
The center got a $50,000 grant to help purchase equipment and a $50,000 loan at a lower-than-market interest rate to help with operating costs during its first few years
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“We created six jobs and now have 125 children,” said Gibson. “It’s attracting (young people) back to our community.”
In Windsor, Brady’s eatery is thriving despite competition from seven other pizzerias.
“We’re right in the middle of the whole oil-and-gas boom, which has brought a lot of employees and a lot of money into the area,” he said.
But during those rough startup years, that USDA loan relieved his financial worries. Without it, he said, “I don’t know if I would have survived as a business.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083, coconnor@denverpost.com or twitter.com/coconnordp
How to apply
For more information about USDA loans and grants, call the Colorado Rural Development Office at 720-544-2903.
