Businesses in some of New Jersey’s lowest-income cities and towns could apply for state aid to cover the cost of rent, as they see revenues evaporate during the COVID-19 pandemic, under a new state aid program announced Thursday.

The $6 million “Small Business Lease – Emergency Assistance Grant Program” will allow businesses in the state’s 64 most at-need towns and cities to apply for the grants, which are capped at $10,000.

Those communities include places like Asbury Park, Atlantic City, Bayonne, Camden, Clifton, Elizabeth, Long Branch, Newark, New Brunswick and Trenton, according to the New Jersey Redevelopment Authority, which oversees financing for economic development projects in 64 those communities.

The rent relief is geared toward smaller-sized businesses. To keep out larger companies, aid is limited to office or retail space of up to 5,000 square feet.

“We truly want to open this to small businesses,” NJRA President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Anderson said at a Thursday afternoon press conference in Long Branch. “It’s going to grill down to those small businesses that need that level of support.”

The $6 million comes out of federal aid allocated to New Jersey under Congress’s landmark Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, like several grant and low-interest loan programs operated by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Applications go live on Aug. 10 and will be available on the NJRA’s website.

As of July 11, the NJEDA had awarded or paid out nearly $24 million to 7,038 companies under its grant program. And as of July 14, the state agency approved more than $4 million of its low-interest pandemic relief loans to 60 separate businesses, out of the $10 million the state Legislature approved.

“They have been able to keep overhead costs, keep employees on payrolls, pay vendors, and have a little extra peace of mind that their business would survive,” as a result of those aid programs, Gov. Phil Murphy said on Thursday.

Tenants leasing mixed-use or commercial space, and those operating a storefront business, are eligible for the rent relief, according to the governor’s office, allowing for the “thousands of small businesses” within the NJRA’s 64 municipalities to be eligible for state relief, according to Murphy.

In May, following Memorial Day weekend, the governor vetoed a bill that would have allowed businesses that have taken a financial hit from the pandemic to delay rent payments for up to three months.

Under the measure, businesses would have been required to repay the rent over six to nine months after the end of the COVID-19 state of emergency.

But Murphy, in his veto message, cautioned that the financial pain of the pandemic would simply be shifted from businesses to commercial landlords, who in turn “may not be relieved of their own obligations to pay mortgage payments and property taxes.”

The rent aid grant program instead, “helps obviously the businesses, but it helps the property owners as well,” Murphy said.

“Many of them, in fact, are small businesses as well,” the governor said.