The Santa Ana district of the Small Business Administration is one of the agency’s fastest-growing operations in the U.S.
It wasn’t always like that.
The Santa Ana operation once was a suburban branch to Los Angeles that faced occasional threats of being closed.
But growth in Southern California’s economy has spurred big gains in SBA loans, which are made through banks and backed by the federal government. The agency was created in 1953.
The SBA operation in Santa Ana covers three counties: the largest U.S. county in geographic size, San Bernardino; one of the fastest-growing economies, Riverside; and one of the wealthiest, Orange.
The number of Santa Ana’s SBA loans for businesses, real estate or equipment jumped 12% to 1,428 for the six months ended March 31, versus a year earlier.
The total value of the loans rose at an even faster clip, up 26% to $490 million in the six-month period.
Loan volume has gone up while the local operation has gotten leaner.
Santa Ana’s SBA office has seen its staff shrink from about 40 workers at its peak a decade ago to about 15 today.
The agency has consolidated loan processing and servicing operations into a handful of SBA facilities from Sacramento to Herndon, Va., giving it a leaner structure, said J. Adalberto Quijada, who oversees the Santa Ana unit as district director.
“This happened during this present administrator’s office, and has been an ongoing function,” Quijada said. “We call it the SBA transformation.”
Is the SBA shorthanded?
“That’s a hard question to answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Everyone could always use more staff,” he said. “The reality of government is we all need to do more with less.”
Quijada said staffing cuts have forced the SBA to form ties with banks and small business community development centers.
“While I may have less staff, it has driven me to the point to build more key partnerships, so I have a huge staff in that sense with chambers of commerce and economic development agencies with cities,” he said.
While the number of small-business loans backed by the federal government is growing in the Santa Ana office, a storm is brewing over the future of the federal agency, which could affect how things are run locally.
Small-business backers were stunned earlier this year when the Senate held hearings about potentially shuttering or reorganizing the SBA under another agency.
Although there’s little likelihood that the SBA program would be shuttered, agency workers nervously await its budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
The federal government has proposed an SBA budget of $624 million for 2007, down from $900 million in 2001.
The SBA has a $533 million budget for 2006, though that’s been called artificially low because it didn’t include funds for disaster loans to cover last year’s hurricanes.
Some observers claim the SBA was slow to hand out disaster assistance loans after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana.
Local SBA officials Mike Lee and Theresa Barsoum didn’t think the media portrayed the agency in a fair light.
The duo volunteered to go to Fort Worth, Texas, to help process disaster assistance loans for thousands of Katrina refugees.
Lee, who is Santa Ana’s SBA assistant director of economic development, volunteered in early December to help process loans just as Quijada came to Santa Ana to replace the retiring Sandy Sutton.
Now in Spokane, Wash., to temporarily run the shorthanded office there, Lee said the volume of loans processed in Fort Worth was very heavy. Many applications were incomplete because records were destroyed from the hurricane.
“The most frustrating part was watching people try to get information and they couldn’t,” he said.
Barsoum, a business development specialist in the Santa Ana office, left for Fort Worth a month before Lee.
Now back in Santa Ana, Barsoum’s desk is piled with disaster assistance paperwork that still needs attention.
Hector Barreto, who’s on his way out as chief administrator of the SBA, made several visits to Fort Worth, where he encouraged 1,000-plus SBA volunteers to ignore media reports critical of the agency’s response.
“Barretto gave us pep talks,” Barsoum said. “The media didn’t portray the SBA as a very friendly agency.”
Last month, just a week before Barreto said he planned to resign to become chairman of the Latino Coalition, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, he was at The Grove in Anaheim to give out awards to small-business owners.
