Plan Focuses On Getting Relief Out Quickly To Small Businesses
Today, John Hickenlooper, a former small business owner, unveiled his plan to help small businesses during the coronavirus crisis.
Hickenlooper wrote, “The stakes could not be higher for our 630,000 small businesses in Colorado and the 1.1 million Coloradans they employ. We must accelerate our efforts to enable small businesses to keep workers on payroll, help households and small businesses survive, and build resilience and the foundation for a restart of our economy.”
Highlights of Hickenlooper’s plan include:
- Boost the Small Business Administration’s Capacity
- The SBA currently administers about $25 billion through this program, an average of about $2 billion per month, and is now looking at a rapid-scale increase up to $349 billion to be delivered in just two months — that’s nearly $175 billion per month! The relief package allocated funding for administrative purposes, and those funds must be used to enhance the SBA’s capacity. They’ve got to hire more people, and fast.
- Get Relief Out Quickly
- John supports leveraging the local and state emergency small business and nonprofit relief funds and existing platforms, such as the Community Reinvestment Fund’s common loan applications for business and loan origination software, to address the small business liquidity and solvency crisis as quickly as humanly possible.
- Give the Smallest Small Businesses Tools to Succeed
- Many of the smallest businesses face unique obstacles in accessing the federal loan programs, and don’t have accountants with the needed experience to navigate a new and complex system. We should consider specific funding for businesses with less than 50 employees. The guiding principles of delivering additional funding should be speed and use of existing technology, information, and infrastructure wherever possible.
- Sow the Seeds of Broader Recovery
- We must start planning for an eventual economic restart now, by taking actions such as working with the private sector to create capital pools and develop financial products that can continue to fund small businesses once the crisis has passed. We need to strengthen the small business safety net by exploring the creation of business interruption insurance related to pandemics.
Read John’s interview with the Denver Business Journal HERE or read the full plan HERE.
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