Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) met with representatives of five Washington businesses on Thursday to discuss their difficulties in securing credit since the recession began and steps the federal government might take to ease the pain.
In a roundtable discussion in the downtown Vancouver offices of marketing agency Alling Henning Associates, Inc., Murray made a pitch of her own for the Main Street Lending Restoration Act, a bill that proposes to use TARP funds to buy off toxic assets and open up credit lines for small businesses.
“I need your help to sell this bill,” Murray said.
Tiffany Turner, owner of the Inn at Discovery Coast in Long Beach, said she could not get a loan to expand her five employee staff, even though she claimed to have a good credit history with her bank.
Lack of credit was a dominant theme at the meeting, with Hoesly ECO Auto & Tire owner Don Orange and Java House and Vintage Distributing owner Lonnie Chandler citing the freeze as an impediment to expansion. Orange and Chandler told Murray they both had to take out lines of credit on their own homes to keep their businesses afloat after their lender, the Bank of Clark County, shut its doors early last year.
“Really, without exception, you will find most small businesses are absolutely ‘all-in,’” Orange said.
According to Chandler, 2009 was Java House’s first “down” year in its 20-year history. His other business, Vintage Distributing, did not fair any better. Last year, Vintage lost 14 of its top 20 wine accounts.
“The banks keep saying there is nothing they can do,” Chandler said. “All the big guys on Wall Street got the money, and the little guys locally don’t have anything.”
Linda McClain and Leslie Currie own an accounting business and have gone two years without raising staff pay because of the financial turmoil. When BCC went under, McClain and Currie said they kept afloat with the help of a Small Business Administration loan.
“We were afraid to get another bank loan at first …people were saying the FDIC was sticking around to shut down other banks,” Currie said.
The freeze in credit also affected the host of Thursday’s meeting, Betsy Henning of marketing company AHA! Henning’s firm, which employs 33 people, was forced to close a credit line used for her $100,000 bi-weekly payroll because of the meltdown in the economy.
Many members of the group thanked Murray for voting for a sweeping federal healthcare reform bill, which gives businesses a tax credit up to 35 percent on insurance premiums and will allow smaller firms to purchase coverage for their employees via a health insurance exchange.
“Nearly 88 percent of all businesses are small businesses,” Chandler said. “If we can’t get money, there won’t be a recovery.”
Perhaps mirroring the mood at this meeting of embattled business owners, as Murray left the building, she passed a WWII-era poster printed by the British government to boost morale for an island under siege by Nazi Germany. It read: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”
