Track the progress of this bill here.
AB 2463 would help small manufacturers with a Small Business Technical Assistance Program. Read LAEDC’s support letter below.
Take action! Contact Assemblymember Ting’s office ( [email protected])
Track the progress of this bill here.
April 5, 2018
The Honorable Philip Ting The Honorable Jim Cooper
Chair, Assembly Budget Committee Chair, Assembly Budget Subcommittee 4
California State Capitol California State Capitol
Sacramento, California 95814 Sacramento, California 95814
Re: 2018-19 Budget for small business technical assistance & AB 2463 – SUPPORT
Chairs Ting and Cooper:
On behalf of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC), an organization whose purpose is to advance opportunity and prosperity for all, I am pleased to offer our support for the following: the $20 million proposed in Governor Brown’s 2018-19 State Budget for small business technical assistance; and Assembly Bill (AB) 2463 (Quirk-Silva and Cervantes), which establishes the Small Business Technical Assistance Program within the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz).
The LAEDC, through its Business Assistance Program, offers confidential, free-of-charge consulting to businesses across all industry sectors, helping businesses overcome challenges so they can grow and hire. Since 1996, the LAEDC has helped to retain or attract more than 225,000 annual jobs in Los Angeles County with an estimated labor income, including wages and benefits, of more than $11.2 billion. Taken together with the supported indirect and induced economic activity, a total of more than 450,000 annual jobs with labor income of more than $23 billion have been positively impacted by the LAEDC’s business assistance work.
One of the LAEDC’s featured business assistance partners is California Manufacturing Technology Consulting (CMTC), a private non-profit corporation that provides consulting services to small and mid-sized manufacturers across Southern California. Together, the LAEDC and CMTC work to address and mitigate the many challenges that Los Angeles County manufacturing businesses face as “going concerns” in our region. Under this partnership, the LAEDC’s on-the-ground field work involves providing no-cost, one-on-one technical assistance services to emerging and existing manufacturers in L.A. County. The LAEDC has had a long-standing partnership with CMTC’s California Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Program Center, one of the small business technical assistance programs identified in AB 2463, to provide technical expertise for improving the competitiveness of manufacturing for small and medium-sized companies.
Manufacturing, though certainly transforming, still matters a great deal in California, supporting over 1.25 million jobs across 39,000 manufacturing firms; seventy percent (70%) of which have fewer than 20 employees. Even so, the state’s MEP Program Center, a critical resource in providing technical assistance to 1,148 businesses (in 2017) in this important small business sector, has been consistently under-resourced in proportion to the size of California’s manufacturing sector.
AB 2463 helps to rectify this by establishing the Small Business Technical Assistance Program, administered through GO-Biz, for the purpose of providing matching funds to federally designated small business assistance centers such as the MEP Program Center, as well as Small Business Development Centers, the Women’s Business Centers, the Procurement Technical Assistance Centers, and the Veteran Business Outreach Centers. All of these are important programs supporting small business growth in California, and the LAEDC asks you to support AB 2463, along with the Governor’s $20 million budget appropriation for Small Business Technical Assistance.
Sincerely,
David Flaks
President and COO
Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation