As hard times get harder, the small business community is ever more essential to San Francisco
By Bruce B. Brugmann
(Scroll down for this week’s editorials, after the jump)
As the mayor’s drastic package of cuts fall on the Supervisors at their Tuesday meeting,
the questions abound: Why so fast? Why not more discussion and more hearings? Why make the cuts as several supervisors leave the board? Why not wait until the new board is sworn in in January? Why let Mayor Newsom drive the cuts, the agenda, and the timing almost unilaterally?
And there is a key question our editorial points out for Wednesday’s edition:
“Why are we talking about cutting the $800,000 Small Business Assistance Center, which actually helps the most important sector of the economy, when there’s $10 million, much of it redundant, in the mayor’s Office of Economic Development?”
As hard times get harder, the small business community is ever more essential as the city’s economic engine. Small businesses create the most net new jobs in the city, according to major Guardian studies. According to a 2006 study by Economist Kent Sims, Former Mayor Frank Jordan’s economic chieftan, small businesses helped moderate the 2000 to 2004 recession’s negative employment and earnings impact on San Francisco households.
Sims also found that small businesses released less than l0 per cent of their employees during the recession while large businesses released more than 20 per cent of their employees, despite the fact that the two groups of businesses had similar shares of pre-recession private employment. Further, he found that small business layoffs generated about 2l per cent of the negative employment and earnings impacts on San Francisco households in 2003, compared with 79 per cent for large businesses. And of course we all know that it is the small businesses that keep our neighborhoods friendly, vibrant, and economically productive. For example, on the economic point, the Guardian’s Shop Local campaign may put $l00 million into the local economy, immediately. (We are asking our 600,000 or so readers to spend at least $l00 in a locally owned business.)
You get the point. Now more than ever, small business ought to be nourished and protected, not put to the slashers once again at City Hall. The supervisors need to keep the Small Business Assistance Center in the budget and, if necessary, slash the mayor’s $10 million Office of Economic Development. And then the supervisors should take a deep breath, postpone the final vote until the new board comes in, and start considering the realistic progressive agenda advanced in the editorial and stories in the Guardian. B3