With the one-year anniversary of the closing of the Washington Bridge coming up on Wednesday, a group of nearly 100 East Providence business owners are in for an early holiday surprise much more pleasant than the one they got a year ago.

The City of East Providence sent out 92 grant award letters on Friday to proprietors who reported financial losses in the immediate months following the closing of the Washington Bridge. And rather than getting a maximum of $2,500 in support, as had been advertised since the applications opened this fall, those 92 business owners will be looking at checks worth up to $10,000 when they come in.

In an exclusive interview, Mayor Bob DaSilva said that the decision to up the total award amount came after analyzing the pool of money available compared to the total number of eligible applicants who were in line to receive grants.

“We looked at what they were applying for and eligible for, and we saw we had sufficient money left that we could try to make this award more impactful,” he said. “What we looked at was making the maximum threshold $10,000, and it kind of worked out.”

The city received 264 total applications for relief. Around a third of those, however, were discovered to have been submitted using fraudulent information during the initial screening of the applications.

“We found that 84 of them were fraudulent. These people were putting in bogus passports and licenses as identification,” DaSilva said. “The good thing is that East Providence is small enough that we know the proprietors of these businesses. Not all of them, but most of them. So when you see a business putting in for a grant and it has a person identifying as the owner who is not the owner, that makes things kind of clear.”

Another 69 of the applications were deemed ineligible for relief. That left 111 legitimate applications that were approved. Of those, 19 have been randomly selected for an audit to prove that their losses were as reported.

According to DaSilva, 40 of the businesses receiving checks will be made whole, meaning they will be receiving a payment equal to the amount they claimed to have lost as a result of the bridge closure. If all those being audited pass, another 11 businesses will be made whole. The remaining 60 within the approved pool reported losses over $10,000, and will receive the $10,000 maximum.

DaSilva says businesses are recovering
The eligible period for declared losses included December of 2023, and January and February of 2024. At the time, there was widespread concern regarding the financial impact that the ongoing closure would have specifically on East Providence. But during the interview on Wednesday, DaSilva said that he has received a much different outlook from business owners as the one-year anniversary of the bridge’s closure nears.

“I talk to businesses today, and a lot of them are back to normal,” he said. “I’m not hearing too much from people suffering dramatically.”

Asked how many businesses have closed as a result of the bridge, DaSilva said it was a difficult question to answer with certainty.

“I don’t know of any businesses that closed. We’ve cut ribbons on new businesses,” he said. “It’s hard to quantify that. There are certain business ventures that historically have a low success rate. Certain restaurants, for example. Not every restaurant is going to succeed that opens…You combine opening a restaurant with this; was it the bridge that caused the restaurant to fail, or did the restaurant fail because it was going to fail anyways?”

DaSilva said that, while the city can still go into gridlock when there is an accident on the highway or the bridge, he said he still hears more positive feedback than negative from businesses in regards to things returning to a state of normalcy.

“I think our businesses in our community have evolved the way they do business and they’re resilient enough to adapt to what’s going on,” he said. “And speaking to a lot of businesses, I’m getting positive feedback from them that they’re doing a lot better or they’re doing as well as they were doing pre-bridge closure. That’s not the same for every business, and I’m not saying that every business is doing as well. But a lot of the people I speak to are telling me, ‘Yeah, we’re doing good. We’re getting people back in the door.’”

What to do with leftover money?
In total, the City of East Providence received $1.2 million from the state for the bridge relief grants. The City of Providence got $600,000, and the Rhode Island Commerce got $600,000.

The 92 approved businesses receiving checks amounts to $712,752 in relief. DaSilva said that if all the audited businesses receive the funding they requested — with the adjusted $10,000 maximum grant — East Providence will still have more than $300,000 in the pot available to give out.

He said that no decision has been made yet on what to do with that remaining money. He said that another round of grants directly going to businesses could be an option.

“We’re talking about doing a round of applications for those businesses in East Providence that did not apply the first time,” he said. “Now, we feel we've gone above and beyond in trying to get people to apply, but maybe the coverage of this award of the money going out the door, people will realize ‘Hey, maybe I should apply.’ We’ll see what happens.”

DaSilva also advocated for using that remaining funding to provide relief to East Providence residents, who he argued also experienced financial hardships as a result of the closure. His prior pitch to provide $50 gift cards to residents that could only be used at affected businesses was rejected by the City Council back in September. He said that he might be inclined to explore that kind of option again.

“What’s still on the table, despite the Council’s rebuking, I still think our residents who live in the area deserve some relief also,” he said. “If we can find a way to get this money into their hands and let them spend it at the local businesses that were impacted, you get a two-for; you’re helping out the residents and you’re helping out the businesses.”

Regardless of what ultimately happens, DaSilva said he was grateful to be able to give businesses relief above and beyond what they anticipated during the holiday season after such a difficult year.

“We’re excited to see the money get to the businesses. Ultimately, we know that we can’t make everybody whole, but at least this will offer some relief,” he said. “Our hope is that it helps people get through whatever hardship they felt by this.”