The County of Ventura has just issued checks to the first round of 1,000 recipients of the $5,000 Business Assistance Grants funded by the County and the Cities of Moorpark and Camarillo. Lottery winners in the first round have already been notified that they were selected.

If you didn't get a letter advising you were selected in the first round of the lottery, there are two more rounds of lottery selections yet to come. On July 28, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors voted to contribute an additional $5,000,000 to the program, which means an additional 1,000 grants will be awarded through the program.

In total, more than 3,000 grants will be awarded to the approximately 5,000 applications that were received. You do NOT need to re-apply for future grant lottery rounds. Your initial application will cover your business for all three lottery rounds.

Everybody wants to know when additional sectors of the economy can re-open. While Ventura County Health Officials cannot point to a specific date, we do know that Ventura County must get itself removed from the State's Monitoring List before they can re-open. Failing to meet any one of six metrics can land a County on the Monitoring List, and Ventura County now complies with five of the six. You can check Ventura County's current figures for the State's criteria at www.venturacountyrecovers.org (see page 7 of the reports at the bottom), but here are today's figures:

The sooner we bring down the daily number of new COVID-19 cases in Ventura County, the sooner we can get off of the State's Monitoring List and start re-opening more sectors of the Moorpark economy. Based on the Ventura County population, we must average 60 (or fewer) new daily cases over a 14-day period to comply with this standard. For reference, there were 119 new COVID-19 cases in Ventura County reported today.