By Selen Ozturk

With minority-owned Los Angeles businesses taking a double-hit of the pandemic and recent fires, the county is stepping up help.

LA County houses approximately 1,397,434 small businesses, comprising nearly 99.96% of all businesses in the county — with more of these being women- and minority-owned than any other U.S. county.

To help these businesses recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and the January wildfires, the county Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) has launched new programs including relief funds, legal aid, insurance navigation help, unemployment insurance extensions, a space-sharing site, and support for sidewalk vendors and home-based kitchens.

“Small businesses and entrepreneurs are the backbone of the LA County economy,” said DEO Director Kelly LoBianco. “They provide essential goods and services. They provide spaces for communities to convene … but in the last 60 days, there has been devastation.”

The fires wreaked up to $275 billion in damages, with nearly 1,900 small businesses within the burn zones and tens of thousands of people displaced from their homes.

To help, DEO has extended unemployment and disaster unemployment insurance through March 31, with one-on-one application help

This resource, and all those to follow, are available with more details on the DEO website; by phone at 844-777-2059; by email at deo@opportunity.lacounty.gov; and in-person at the department office at 510 S. Vermont Avenue, east LA.

Other help available includes one-stop permit help; emergency cash relief grants; daily multilingual business resource events and webinars; a free space-sharing web portal for businesses needing storefronts or kitchens.

Pro bono legal aid including commercial lease agreements, employee safety, wages and benefits, contract negotiation, intellectual property, tax liability, entity structuring and bankruptcy is also available; get in touch online or by phone at 866-375-9511.

“In February 2024, the county also passed an ordinance creating a program, permit and workshops for sidewalk food and other vendors to come into the formal economy,” said LoBianco. “Similarly, last November, we launched MEHKO, the Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations Ordinance, another pathway for vendors to grow their business in their own home kitchen.”

Interested vendors can operate a home kitchen that also serves as a commissary space for up to two vending carts, and can serve up to 30 home cooked meals per day, up to 90 per week, in annual sales of $100,000.

Public health webinars, permit help and funding aid — including first-year offset permit costs for 1,000 applicants through June 2026 — are available at the MEHKO website.

One beneficiary, Richard Gomeztrejo, owner of WRAPS-TO-GOmeztrejo, heard of the program while sharing food with coworkers in the break room at his then-job as interior kitchen designer at a big-box store.

“At the start of the pandemic, my coworkers weren’t ordering food like they normally could. And when I was in the break room, they’d always comment: ‘What smells so good?’” he explained. “I started bringing pasta, ribs and hot wings to share. Then wraps. I’m Hispanic, so a wrap isn’t a huge leap — just an open ended burrito.”

“My tagline is: I’m not a chef, I just make wraps. It’s nothing serious,” Gomeztrejo continued. “MEHKO helped me turn my side hustle into something more. I got a food handler certificate, a permit … an inspector came to my house and approved my kitchen. It helped me build up my clientele. I say ‘Look, guys, I’m legitimate now,’ and so they’re more comfortable to place their orders and spread the word about me.”

“If you’re going to start a business, you have to have confidence, and you have to be consistent. I work as if someone’s looking over my shoulder,” he added. I’m not going to cut corners. I have a lot of fun doing this, and the legal help I got allows me to sleep well at night.”

Extensive free legal help is also available through the LA/SoCal Small Business Development Center (SBDC).

Before becoming regional director of the SBDC Patrick Nye worked as a climate change researcher in the Arctic for the U.S. Coast Guard, then worked in the brewing industry in Oregon, then worked in renewable energy PR.

“It’s a very diverse resume, but a common thread is mission-related work, and that certainly lends itself toward the SBDC,” he said. “We do two things — for one, provide daily training workshops across all small business topics, mostly online and some in person.”

“More importantly, we do one-on-one advising in 20 different languages to coach small businesses to start and grow,” Nye continued. “We’re federally funded, so these are your tax dollars and actions. We help you take advantage of all the resources — fedreal, state, local — that are available to help you get capital, contracts, plans, relocate, whatever you need … including disaster recovery like insurance and FEMA loans.”

“When disaster strikes, people rarely think about the invisible or indirect impacts,” said Liana Austin, director of Discovery World Early Education Center, a south LA-based school that was] saved by free legal aid through the county.

“One is that with a reduced amount of commercial spaces due to fires or lockdowns, rents and demand increase, and businesses face pressure or displacement from lease renegotiations and hidden terms,” she explained.

While DSW had a long-term lease in when their building was bought in 2022, that year, the new property owners “added $100,000 to our invoice one month, claiming that we owed them additional reimbursements for water utilities going back to 2006, when they only bought the property in 2022, we’d already been paying for 18 years, their invoices didn’t add up to the amount said and the statute of limitations passed anyway,” said Austin.

She had become founding director of the school to continue the now-35-year legacy of her founding mother; before this, Austin earned a degree in engineering and a certificate for early education and child care.

“Even with a more technical background, legal challenges can become a costly full-time job for a small business trying to enforce its rights, like under the lease,” she said. In general, business owners are assumed to be savvy, so there’s less protections. But we have to do almost everything. For example, I have a contractor’s license so I can fix things.”

DEO legal aid “secured us with pro bono assistance with large firms to help with things like employment law compliance and reviewing documents, and smaller attorneys to help with the landlord,” Austin continued. “With a small amount of work, they helped us a tremendous amount, like going to our licensing advocate with us, because our landlord was trying to relocate us to a space that would be unsuitable.”

“Navigating the law is extremely complicated and nuanced, and there’s this power imbalance between different players in the small business realm … you’re battling a player that has a lot more power commercially than you do,” she added. “I encourage everyone to get this free help.”