Local SBA Office--Slated for Closure--Gets Reprieve
Remember the Small Business Administration’s plans to shut down district offices in Santa Ana and elsewhere?
Well, a year later, nothing has happened. None of those offices has closed, and recently SBA’s chief quietly disclosed that those plans have been shelved--for now.
Whatever “for now” means in SBA-talk, that’s great news for local SBA folks, bankers and small businesses.
SBA’s office in Orange County, one of the busiest in the nation, processes tens of millions of dollars of business loans annually. Its closure--which was supposed to be part of federal government streamlining--was seen as a big blow to this entrepreneurial minded county.
So why the about-face?
SBA officials in Washington purse their lips when asked. But others in the know say the agency changed its mind after a barrage of complaints from business owners and legislators, from Rochester, N.Y., to Springfield, Mo., to California.
Even in conservative, government reform-minded Orange County, half a dozen lawmakers joined in a campaign that basically said, “Good idea, but not in my backyard you don’t.”
The local effort to save SBA’s office included a trip to Washington by a delegation of the Orange County Business Council. Others, like Steve Stultz, a longtime SBA consultant in Newport Beach, fired off letters to SBA’s head, Philip Lader.
“They all helped; it all helped,” says Sandy Sutton, acting district director of SBA’s Santa Ana office. Even so, Sutton wasn’t about to second-guess what might happen to the office a year from now.
Neither was Robert Ucciferri, president of the Bank of Yorba Linda. But for now, Ucciferri is all smiles. His community bank is one of the top SBA lenders in Orange County.
“We love the program,” he says. “And we love them staying in Orange County.”
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Don Lee covers workplace and small-business issues for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7407 and at don.lee@latimes.com.
