Rural Small Business Resilience Act
The Rural Small Business Resilience Act would require the Small Business Administration (SBA) to improve how rural residents access disaster assistance after a declared disaster. Within one year of enactment, the SBA Administrator must ensure that the Associate Administrator for the Office of Disaster Recovery and Resilience takes actions to guarantee full access for rural individuals to disaster aid provided under SBA’s disaster program, including targeted outreach and marketing materials tailored to rural communities. The measure also includes a technical housekeeping change that redesignates a paragraph related to the statute of limitations in the Small Business Act. In short, the bill focuses on making it easier for people in rural areas to learn about and obtain SBA disaster assistance after disasters, primarily through enhanced outreach, while making a minor change to the act’s numbering.
Key Points
- 1Objective: Improve access to SBA disaster assistance for individuals located in rural areas after a disaster declaration.
- 2Implementation deadline: Requires action within 1 year of enactment, led by the Associate Administrator of the Office of Disaster Recovery and Resilience.
- 3Tools for outreach: Includes targeted outreach and marketing materials directed at rural individuals to raise awareness and utilization of available assistance.
- 4Definition reference: Rural areas are defined as in paragraph 16 of section 7(b) of the Small Business Act (the same reference used for what constitutes “rural” for this purpose).
- 5Technical amendment: Renames the current paragraph about the statute of limitations from paragraph (16) to paragraph (17) in section 7(b) of the Small Business Act (a housekeeping change, not a policy shift).