Group asks D.C. mayor-elect for "Small Business Czar"

And welcome back. This is Fox 5 Weekend Live. I'm Jim Locke. Glad to be with you on this Sunday. As we learned this week, D.C. will have a brand new mayor, Janice Lewis-George, winning in resounding fashion. We've talked a lot about the challenges that are ahead for the citizens of Washington, D.C., but there's also the question about the small business community. That's where my guests come in. Mary Quillian and Alistair Chang are both here tonight. We're talking about why the focus, where the mayor should focus moving ahead. First of all, thank you both for coming in tonight. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having us. You are the owner of the venerable Mr. Henry's up on Capitol Hill. How long now in business? 60 years. Yeah. What makes it special? That it's been around so long, right? And it's a very inclusive environment. Yeah. From everything there, you have the jazz upstairs, and it's been a landmark, too. Alistair, you're sort of part of this coalition here. Explain, why are you speaking up now, and what's your message to the mayor-elect, Janice Lewis-George? Right, so. Personally, my experience, it took me over a year to get certified as a small business from the agency that is supposed to be helping small businesses, and I was only able to do it by paying an expediter who used to work at that agency. And that's backwards to me. We shouldn't have to know an insider in order to get a straight answer from the government. So when we talk about what a business needs from a government, it's not just not just to sustain itself, but also just to get off the ground. What challenges? Well, like if somebody if I want to open up a restaurant in D.C., it's not something I can say I'm going to do it on a Monday. The idea comes on a Monday and then by Friday, the groundwork is laid. How long does it usually take to from idea to fruition? I mean, you have to deal with over 10 agencies to open a restaurant, for example. I know this. And, you know, it'll take probably a year, year and a half. You know, I know of a business that was trying to open, and it took them seven and a half months just to get their construction permit in order to do their build-out. And then, you know, you have to layer on top of that inspections, and then you have to get your certificate of occupancy and health inspection and fire inspection. All those things are important, and we're not saying any of those corners should be cut, but it's got to be streamlined, and the process has to be predictable. And frankly, small businesses, you know, I do all of that for my restaurant. I don't have staff. That does that, like a larger company would. So small businesses need somebody, a point person in the government that can help us get through all these different agencies and deal with this in a predictable fashion. I think I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask it anyway for the purpose of anybody out there who has not opened a business before. Has it gotten easier or harder to do this through the years? I don't say that it's not easier. It's just different. Okay. You know, and stuff, doing things through the Internet in some cases has made it easier because everybody can see that I've paid my sidewalk tax six months later to get the certificate of use to have my patio every year. I have to pay the tax in June. I don't get the certificate of use until January. I used to have to save the receipt and bring it into the office with me, right? I'm legal. Yeah, right. So now at least they can see online that I've paid. But the problem... With just focusing on the efficiencies online is you still have decision makers behind that and regulations behind that, some of which regulations and rules are at cross purposes with each other. You know, we've got an example of a business that was going into a third floor walk up. Right. You have to take the steps. And they were requiring this business to put an ADA bathroom in so that wheelchairs could fit through the door. Wheelchair isn't going to be going to that business. And it's the nature of a lot of small businesses go into older buildings in Washington, D.C. And we have to have somebody that can look at these situations and make logical decisions on whether is that right. That this business should have to put the expense in into widening the bathroom door. So you talk about that person, that one person. This is why you're both here tonight. There's an idea that there's a group of business owners in D.C. You've gotten together, you've put your heads together, and you think that there could be a solution that you would like to see the mayor undertake. Talk about that. That's right. We would like a referee, right, is the best way I would think about it. Mary mentioned ten agencies for a restaurant. The hardest part, if they all actually aligned in their ask, maybe it would work, right? But often they contradict each other. Or within an agency, when you send out different people, you get conflicting answers. And that is the hardest. We want to follow the rules. We would like them to get to us faster and clearer, right? We want the transparency of what rule to follow. The example that comes to mind for me is one of the folks who signed the letter to ask for this business star, this small business star that we're asking for, has a child care center and said that it took 18 months waiting for agencies to resolve interagency disagreement if we're talking about child care affordability right the best way is to uh you know not have the providers of child care need to pay 18 months of rent with no children in the in the building waiting for a response from the city i think the focus i was looking at it first because i a lot of us look at small businesses and you imagine them as just uh you know retail shops or restaurants or bars but i mean in in your case many other cases out there We're looking at all sorts of businesses that fall under this purview here Absolutely. As a matter of fact, small businesses are the second largest employer to the federal government in this city. So they are absolutely vital to getting our economy back on track because you can open a small business You can hire people. Even if small businesses are only hiring somewhere between two and 50 100 people, still, when you add up all those people second largest employer, that's important And yet a lending tree statistic shows that Washington, D.C., 32 percent of businesses fail in the first year They close. And the national average is something like 24 percent So we're we're worse than average in the country. Are there are there agencies that you've had And I don't want to get anybody in trouble here But are there are there are there factors in the process that are more difficult than others to to to get a business open in D.C.? Or is it is the blame spread across the spectrum here I think we we've heard many different examples from many different agencies and I think about mostly actually it's the Spider-Man meme of you know this yeah this agency says this is not my question actually go talk to them and then you keep getting pointed back and forth and so the reason why we're looking for a small business czar is to help with that mediation right of okay no you two disagree you two agencies disagree someone needs to make a decision so that we're not again Paying rent, waiting for the city to make a decision. There's been so much, too, when you look around the city. And I don't know, again, how this is anecdotally. This is what I saw leading up to COVID, where we saw so many places. It felt like we were turning a corner in some way, shape, or form. Then you had the closures. And now it's afterwards. And there are still a record number of restaurants closing in D.C. Talking with Sean Townsend of the Restaurant Association some time ago and doing what they can. And have there been conversations with the transition team about how You can play a role or any business can play a role in shaping policy here? Yeah, well, I mean, we know that there are people on the transition team who have themselves owned and opened small businesses, and that's great. They've been talking to over 100 small business owners, and they're going to take those stories into consideration as they form their policy. Thank you. You know, I think Alistair and I are specifically pushing for having a small business czar, a small business ombudsman. And we've got 65 small business owners that have signed this saying, please do this and do this quickly so that we can get on track. But we know that the administration and our transition team. Are looking at this and so we're very hopeful and they're talking with us. We've had conversations. So what is it? What does it look like? I mean, what what do what what's their background? Where do they come from? I mean, is there is there an ideal skill set or experience? You have a smile on your face. Nice. Yeah. Someone who has run a small business knows the city. Right. And knows how to build out the relationships with the different agencies to go back to what I was saying of. mediating when when an interagency dispute is happening right and to be able to help make a decision right um i think the the cross if i'm going through my wish list it's also somebody who is able to help think through how do you actually help people navigate what this massive amount of information is so that the small business owner can focus on baking bread taking care of their patients and not hiring another lawyer to go through the entire You know, all of the papers to make sure that they, we want to follow the rules, right? Why do we need to hire somebody to know what the rule actually is that we need to follow and then have so many people tell us conflicting things when we're trying to do the right thing? When you look at the last, which will be 12 years under Mayor Bowser, and, you know, one can argue you see the massive developments. We've seen neighborhoods transformed. I mean, NoMa, where I live in Union Market, and that's changed in Navy Yard. But do you feel like this is... Is there a chance to rekindle a good relationship, not just between larger businesses, but the small business community? Is it something you thought has been missing over the last 12 years, or do you think as far as the mayor's gone, she's done everything that she could do? Well, I think it's these issues. Yeah, I mean, there is a problem, right? You don't have 32% of businesses closing within a year if you don't have a problem, right? And fundamentally, the problem is it's not a predictable path or time frame to get open. So you have too many small businesses that you have a finite amount of capital, and you go and you think, okay, I'm going to budget for 10 months of build-out. But if you can't get your construction permit for eight months, Then all of a sudden, you have to start paying rent or you have to negotiate with the landlord and your capital is gone before you even open the doors. And that's part of the problem. And so it's the predictability of the system. It's a more fluid process. And I think that there are ways to do that. With some sort of central point person, like an ombudsman or a czar, with a staff that pulls from all the different agencies, right? Like, you don't even need to hire a lot of people. Just pull one from each agency and say, okay, you guys are going to be navigators, and you're going to help small businesses figure this out. And I think that's what we would like to see. Aside from appointing czars, somebody to oversee the business community or work with the business community, for that matter, Is there something that you think the mayor-elect can do? On day one or in her first couple of weeks, they would instantly or at least pave the way to make doing business in D.C. easier. Is there something along the way or does it start with does it start with the czar, somebody to oversee policy? So so my take on this is first, you know, I think respect what Mayor Bowser did. Going back to your other question. And we're in a very different economy right now. Right. Just that. things are different and with this transition gives us the opportunity especially because the mayor-elect has said that one of her top priorities is to help small businesses get to yes right so we know that this is a fantastic time to make these asks and so for us you know we know that they are thinking about how do you actually clean up the plumbing right on top of that what we're asking for and i think that when hearing from us is The plumbing is only as effective, right, as, well, how do I say this? I go back to my referee, plumbing referee, maybe you need a better metaphor that lines, but we need a referee to actually help make things move forward when it gets stuck, right? And so I think on top of, right, it's all of those things together that allow this to actually move forward. I think the referee analogy is great. Last word? Yeah, we need a referee. We need somebody that can see through the legacy systems. There is no there's not going to be a super quick fix. But if we have a person that has the authority to push down in the agencies and say, fix this log jam, figure out this this this something that's disagreeing with each other within your own code. Right. Those but you've got to have somebody with authority to do it. And that's important. I think the bottom line is, and this is not... An endorsement on my end of it, either way, but the biggest problem that you see in any business, any organizations, when somebody says, well, this is how we always did it, that's one of the worst things that anybody can say. So when you look to the future and figure out ways to make it easier, I think everybody wins. I appreciate you both. Mary, Alistair, thank you both for coming in. And, of course, is there anywhere, anybody who wants to get more information on this? Yeah, especially if you are a small business owner and you'd like to sign on to this idea, you can go to smallbiz.com. B-I-Z. So Small Biz Capital with an A, D-C. Small Biz Capital, D-C. Thank you both so much. Really appreciate it.