The first headline popped up at 2:30 p.m. Monday. Congressman and auto dealer Mike Kelly and his company received a PPP loan of between $600,000 and $1.4 million dollars for his combined dealerships.

They were among 660,000 businesses, including the Butler Eagle, that received these loans. If you read far enough into any of the multitude of stories about the people receiving loans, you will read a clarification that Kelly’s company did nothing wrong and was clearly eligible for the loan. That is still not going to eliminate all the screaming from political opponents and persons who don’t like anyone being more successful than they are.

The purpose of the PPP loans was to sustain payrolls for companies that had been mostly shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. We editorialized from the beginning that it was the worst, strangest thing we had ever encountered in business. It was a challenge to hurry and spend the money, but do so within the rules. Spend as much as they determined you deserved, but blow through it in eight weeks.

Speaking as a business that applied for and received life-sustaining funds through the program, it was the only way our doors could remain open through the months of March, April, May and June. Without those funds to cover our payroll, we would have had to shut down until advertisers were able to open back up for business.

Car dealers were certainly in the same boat. They lost almost all their sources of revenue just as we did. So, that justifies any of the Butler County car dealers applying for and accepting PPP loans. Before you make the accusation that our position is based on advertising dollars, you should note that car dealers were once our biggest and best advertisers, but today we benefit very little from them.

But some of you are already claiming Kelly Automotive should not be treated the same as all the others because of Mike Kelly being a Congressman, and because he and his family have access to funds that others do not. It doesn’t seem to matter that most of those funds were not and are not directly derived from the car dealership. The roughly 200 employees who get paychecks signed by Kelly would have had to be laid off and put on unemployment instead. Or did you expect a privately owned company should just continue to pay their workers after the state forces them to close the business?

Some of you just answered that question with a “yes” simply because the Kelly family has been successful.

Let us remind you that even prior to running for office, Mike Kelly was an integral part of this community, and he and his extended family were second to none in giving to nonprofits and charities. They also have sat on almost every board in the county.

Maybe the easy way to view this is that no elected official should be able to receive funds for a business from this type of program. Many people feel the system already gives them too much in salary and benefits. If that is the case, then new laws need to be written. But as it stands today, there is nothing wrong with each and every eligible business in Butler County getting their share of the PPP money. That includes ones owned by congressmen.