John’s Story

John Barboza, Barboza Excavating and Landscaping
New Bedford, MA

I have about 30 years experience in this line of work and we’ve been in business for about five years. We did residential homes, new construction of homes, building of water treatment plants, schools, baseball and football fields. We had about five employees, but we got hit pretty good with this pandemic. It’s put us at a standstill.

I contacted the SBA here; I can’t say they were very helpful. They said just go to your local bank. I did that. But I haven’t heard anything back yet. They were all closed up so I did [the PPP application] online in May. I am not sure what’s going on. Have they seen it? Have they processed it? Is it at the bottom of a stack of papers somewhere? Is it in the trash can? I don’t know.

I think minority-owned businesses got hit the worst. I think our counterparts were more successful in applying for and obtaining grants and loans. There are people in the area talking about it through the grapevine: Did you hear about this company? They’re doing this and doing that. If you don’t have someone fighting on your behalf, you don’t get anywhere.

My five employees — work dried up and I couldn’t keep them on without any kind of funding, so I had to let them go. We were very close and had good working relationships and friendships. It was horrible — again, they were not only employees, but friends with families and responsibilities. It was very difficult. Some have been able to move on to other jobs and some are still out of work.

I am going about this basically on my own. I am not getting any direction from anywhere. It was suggested I try other banks. But I haven’t done that yet; the thing is, when I applied at my own bank and I didn’t hear anything back, I got discouraged. And I’ve been banking with them for about four years.

I still have a commercial garage that I store things in, and some utility bills. It’s about $1,500 to $2,000 a month. We’re between a rock and a hard place. If something doesn’t happen soon, my business will be forced to close. By September, October, everything will be dried up, depleted. It would be very sad and difficult, but there’s not going to be much I am going to be able to do.