50% Better Than April; Plenty of Room for Improvement As Pandemic Impacts Majority of Businesses.

As part of our ongoing work to address industry needs during the Covid-19 pandemic, CALSSA did a follow up survey of our members from July 17-30, 2020 with an eye toward determining whether conditions were improving. Results can be found here, including some of these highlights: 

• Of our 252 company respondents, 80% reported being overall negatively impacted by Covid-19 with 18% in the extreme negative category compared to 41% in April.  

• 50% report doing better than the early months of the pandemic, 34% report doing worse, and 16% report no change in business. Another measure of recovery: 76% of respondents report either no change or an increase in business activity for this summer quarter compared to summer 2019. 

• 48% of companies received some form of federal assistance. 6% of companies were denied all forms of assistance.

• Looking ahead, 51% report having a somewhat or a very optimistic outlook for the next six months, a 10% jump over how companies were feeling during CALSSA’s first survey conducted in April. Driving optimism, the vast majority of companies have a pipeline of projects, although customer interest is still not what it was pre-Covid. 

CALSSA has felt the pain of Covid-19 alongside our companies. In April, we made cuts to adjust for lower income and rolled out some special Covid-19 fundraising efforts to help make up for the loss of in person events. Many thanks to our members who stepped up to help this summer! We continue to advocate for policies that will get us all back to work even as we defend foundational policies from utility attacks such as SMUD’s attack on NEM and the IOUs upcoming campaign against NEM. 

Please let us know if there’s more we can be doing for you.