Village of New Lenox, Illinois

just trying to survive,” Dye chimes in. “So, the Village Board created a bridge loan program to help carry them through until the Small Business Administration (SBA) funds were extended.” SBA loans through the federal government, in addition to corporate grants, were communicated to the Village’s local businesses via email, using a master list compiled by Dye herself. She notes, “I probably sent out 25 notifications. I didn’t want to flood them, of course. But they touched on Will County grants, state grants, and they were also just about the different requirements that restaurants had to comply with. We had a face mask ordinance to give our businesses some ‘teeth’, if you will, to get some relief if someone came into their establishment and refused to wear one. The whole point of it was to keep the businesses sustained as much as possible.” For her outstanding service to the community, the New Lenox Chamber of Commerce named Dye the 2020 Citizen of the Year. “It was in great part because of the support that they felt from her, speaking on behalf of the Village,” Ellis shares. The past year also exposed several trends in growing markets and revealed other opportunities in niche categories that Dye believes the Village would not have otherwise seen. “Those new areas that came through – and this is probably a national impact – were small entrepreneurial and home-based businesses,” she says. “In the last quarter of 2020, we also saw more counseling services emerging, but given how the pandemic has affected children and isolated so many of us, I think it spoke to that movement, or that need, for counselors to open an office in the Village.” The Village is fortunate to be low on vacant commercial building stock, something Dye sees as a sure sign of economic health and confidence in New Lenox’s future, despite the