A relief fund for Indiana small businesses could get a vote next week in the state Senate, but some businesses are lobbying to expand it.

The bill is targeted mainly at restaurants, bars and hotels, but any business could be eligible if it has fewer than 100 workers, grosses less than 10-million dollars, and lost at least a third of that revenue to the pandemic after turning a profit the year before.

That revenue limit would rule out Noblesville’s Ruoff Music Center, but Live Nation lobbyist Mark Shublak argues the pandemic has made the concert venue a small business, dropping Live Nation’s payroll from more than 12-hundred workers to eight. And he argues the hotels and eateries the bill is trying to help won’t recover if they don’t have customers, and they won’t have customers without the entertainment attractions that draw them.

And Markle Senator Travis Holdman (R) says the bill leaves out businesses which had just opened and weren’t earning enough yet to meet the eligibility requirements.

The Senate will debate possible changes, but Appropriations Chairman Ryan Mishler (R-Bremen) warns if you change the eligibility, the businesses who just miss the new cutoffs will ask to move it again.

The fund would use federal assistance to give businesses up to 10-thousand dollars a month for five months to help with payroll and other expenses while they try to ride out the pandemic. It’s similar to an 11-million-dollar Indianapolis grant fund which gave about 600 restaurants an average of 18-thousand dollars last year.

Indiana Restaurant and Lodging Association president Patrick Tamm says one in five Indiana restaurants has closed since the pandemic began, and says he expects the casualty rate to hit 50-percent by the end of the year without additional help.