Orange Chamber Gets Grant to Assist, Retain Businesses

The Chamber of Commerce here will receive almost $55,000 in the next year from the city’s Redevelopment Agency for projects that are intended to keep businesses from leaving the city.

The money will pay for chamber programs aimed directly at assisting and communicating with manufacturers and small businesses.

“We don’t find out what the problems are until after the point where a business has decided to leave,” said Brent Hunter, executive director of the chamber. “We want a handle on what is going on out there so we can address problems before they reach a crisis mode.”

The Redevelopment Agency grant is a direct outgrowth of a business retention study released earlier this year by the chamber after several manufacturers, employing more than 100 people each, left Orange for other cities or states. The study urged that a manufacturers’ council be formed to allow industrial companies to share concerns and information.

In keeping with those results, about $23,000 of the money awarded to the chamber will be used to create and publicize such a group, Hunter said. Along with setting up meetings for manufacturers, the chamber will arrange for them to receive up-to-date information about state business requirements such as pollution regulations, as well as local issues such as code enforcement.

The rest of the money is intended for workshops for local small-business owners. There will be eight sessions a year to allow business owners to confer with professionals such as accountants and advertising executives.

“We’re finding a lot of cases where people just need technical help to get them through,” Hunter said. “A lot of small businesses do fail, and a lot of people keep going into it. We are trying to help stabilize that as much as we can and try to help people through.”

In the past, the city has given money to the chamber for such projects as maps and pamphlets, said Jim Evans, Orange’s assistant city manager.

“It’s a lot easier to retain a business than find a new one,” Evans said. “. . . With the changes in the economy, the turndown in the defense industry and other structural changes, we had to ask what we could do locally to retain the businesses that we have.”