Little help for small businesses

Small businesses create more than half the new jobs. They contribute about half the country’s gross domestic product.

But they’re too diverse to be a unified constituency, and as such have little natural political power.

MY OPINION: THOMAS OLIVER
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As proof, there’s nothing really in the so-called stimulus package for the small-business owner.

There is some additional funding for the Small Business Administration, which at first blush sounds good, but on closer inspection seems to create a new Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

The bill would grant the SBA the authority to make direct loans and to establish a secondary market lending authority within the SBA that could make loans to “systemically important” lenders as well as guarantee pools of SBA loans sold to investors.

Can you say, “Here we go again”?

“We don’t need another Freddie and Fannie,” said Karen Kerrigan, president and CEO of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, a Washington-based advocacy group.

“Small business needs tax certainty [meaning, extending the tax cuts set to expire next year], relief and incentives,” she said. Kerrigan said her group has found little for small business in the House-passed stimulus bill, which she says is more of an omnibus spending bill. The National Small Business Association and the National Federation of Independent Business concur.

Jimmy Adams, vice president of Atlanta-based Adams Transfer & Storage, said he sees nothing in the stimulus bill for his company or for small business in general.

The SBA honored the 106-year-old company last year as the family-owned business of the year in Georgia.

Last month, the company laid off 8 percent of its work force, or six employees, some with 30 years with the company. Something tells you that it was more painful for Adams to lay off those six than it was for NEC President Kaoru Yano to cut 20,000 jobs this past week.

“We waited as long as we could,” Adams said.

Adams Transfer has diversified over the years from a traditional moving company to a data storage and industrial property owner and manager. It’s the moving-company third of the operation that has suffered along with the housing market. If people aren’t buying houses, they aren’t moving.

Prior to last year’s downturn, Adams Transfer had posted consistent profits and asset increases. Last year, revenue dropped 25 percent.

Adams seems most perturbed by the strained relationship with his bank.

“I don’t know where we stand,” he said of the bank his company has done business with for 55 years. Adams said his company is still able to borrow for operations, but it has to jump through hoops, supplying cash-flow reports and other proof of its ability to afford the loan.

“I would never have thought it would come to this,” he said.