The bill passed the committee with only a single dissenting vote.

S.B.1215, the Pre qualified List for A & E and other professional service firms, in State and Federal contracting, would stop the award of billions of dollars yearly in small business contracts to the same firms or classified large firms and other corporate giants.  This is a problem the American Small Business League (ASBL) has estimated is currently costing America’s small and minority business more than $100 billion annually. Report 5-15 from the Small Business Administration Office of Inspector General described this problem as, “one of the most important challenges facing the Small Business Administration and the entire Federal government today.”

S.B. 1215 has to do with establishing a “Pre qualified list” for architectural, landscape architectural, engineering, environmental, land surveying and construction management firms that possess the qualifications established by Caltrans or other State agencies, with the firms ranked in order of qualifications. Interested firm would submit statement of qualifications for general scope of work within each generic professional service category. The list would be maintained for two or three years.

As specific project services are identified, the Dept. or Agency will contact the firm on the top of the list for staffing, capability and availability. If that top firm does not fit, the Dept or Agency can continue to contact firms throughout the top five without approval.  The placement of the firms remains, but the awarded firm goes to the bottom of the list, allowing all qualified firms to receive project work.  Each professional service or A & E list would be established in three categories-$100,000 to $500,000, $500,000 to $5 million, over $5 million. A firm could only be in one category of a specific service. Thirty-two states have pre qualified lists.

Currently S.B. 1215 is in the California Senate Transportation and Housing Committee and the Hearing on the bill will take place April 20 at 1:30 PM Room 4203 State Capital Building.  We need your help. Please send a letter of Support to Senator Curran Price, State Capital Room 2052 Sacramento CA 95814 or electronically to Tiffani.Alvidrez@sen.ca.gov

Source: http://nationalblackbusinessmonth2009.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/california-senate-hearing-april-20-on-pre-qualification-bill/

WASHINGTON (AP) -- America's "Great Compromiser" Henry Clay called government "the great trust," but most Americans today have little faith in Washington's ability to deal with the nation's problems.

Public confidence in government is at one of the lowest points in a half century, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center. Nearly 8 in 10 Americans say they don't trust the federal government and have little faith it can solve America's ills, the survey found.

The findings illustrate the ominous situation President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party face as they struggle to maintain their comfortable congressional majorities in this fall's elections. Midterm prospects are typically tough for the party in power. Add a toxic environment like this and lots of incumbent Democrats could be out of work.

Released Sunday, the survey found that just 22 percent of those questioned say they can trust Washington almost always or most of the time and just 19 percent say they are basically content with it. Nearly half say the government negatively affects their daily lives, a sentiment that's grown over the past dozen years.

This anti-government feeling has driven the tea party movement, reflected in fierce protests this past week.

"The government's been lying to people for years. Politicians make promises to get elected, and when they get elected, they don't follow through," says Cindy Wanto, 57, a registered Democrat from Nemacolin, Pa., who joined several thousand for a rally in Washington on April 15 - the tax filing deadline. "There's too much government in my business. It was a problem before Obama, but he's certainly not helping fix it."

Majorities in the survey call Washington too big and too powerful, and say it's interfering too much in state and local matters. The public is split over whether the government should be responsible for dealing with critical problems or scaled back to reduce its power, presumably in favor of personal responsibility.

About half say they want a smaller government with fewer services, compared with roughly 40 percent who want a bigger government providing more. The public was evenly divided on those questions long before Obama was elected. Still, a majority supported the Obama administration exerting greater control over the economy during the recession.

Only twice since the 1950s has public skepticism dipped this deeply - from 1992 to 1995 during which time it hit 17 percent, and 1978 to 1980, bottoming out at 25 percent. The nation was going through economic struggles during both of those periods.

"Trust in government rarely gets this low," said Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan center that conducted the survey. "Some of it's backlash against Obama. But there are a lot of other things going on."

And, he added: "Politics has poisoned the well."

The survey found that Obama's policies were partly to blame for a rise in distrustful, anti-government views. In his first year in office, the president orchestrated a government takeover of Detroit automakers, secured a $787 billion stimulus package and pushed to overhaul the health care system.

But the poll also identified a combination of factors that contributed to the electorate's hostility: the recession that Obama inherited from President George W. Bush; a dispirited public; and anger with Congress and politicians of all political leanings.

"I want an honest government. This isn't an honest government. It hasn't been for some time," said self-described independent David Willms, 54, of Sarasota, Fla. He faulted the White House and Congress under both parties.

The poll was based on four surveys done from March 11 to April 11 on landline and cell phones. The largest survey, of 2,500 adults, has a margin of sampling error of 2.5 percentage points; the others, of about 1,000 adults each, has a margin of sampling error of 4 percentage points.

In the short term, the deepening distrust is politically troubling for Obama and Democrats. Analysts say out-of-power Republicans could well benefit from the bitterness toward Washington come November, even though voters blame them, too, for partisan gridlock that hinders progress.

In a democracy built on the notion that citizens have a voice and a right to exercise it, the long-term consequences could prove to be simply unhealthy - or truly debilitating. Distrust could lead people to refuse to vote or get involved in their own communities. Apathy could set in, or worse - violence.

Democrats and Republicans both accept responsibility and fault the other party for the electorate's lack of confidence.

"This should be a wake-up call. Both sides are guilty," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. She pointed to "nonsense" that goes on during campaigns that leads to "promises made but not promises kept." Still, she added: "Distrust of government is an all-American activity. It's something we do as Americans and there's nothing wrong with it."

Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican who won a long-held Democratic Senate seat in Massachusetts in January by seizing on public antagonism toward Washington, said: "It's clear Washington is broken. There's too much partisan bickering to be able to solve the problems people want us to solve."

And, he added: "It's going to be reflected in the elections this fall."

But Matthew Dowd, a top strategist on Bush's re-election campaign who now shuns the GOP label, says both Republicans and Democrats are missing the mark.

"What the country wants is a community solution to the problems but not necessarily a federal government solution," Dowd said. Democrats are emphasizing the federal government, while Republicans are saying it's about the individual; neither is emphasizing the right combination to satisfy Americans, he said.

With the November Congressional elections on their minds, Senate Democrats are working on a bill that would reportedly help small businesses get more access to loans, government contracts and overseas markets.

The bill would potentially use money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program for loans made through community banks, The Washington Post reported yesterday. Also under consideration are provisions that would raise the limits on SBA-guaranteed loans from $2 million to $5 million, increase access to government contracts and research grants, and provide more support to export programs.

The timing is potentially spot-on for small businesses. We're finally seeing some signs that the economy is recovering, like increased retail sales figures for March. Given more funding and bigger markets, downturn-weary entrepreneurs might finally be able to move from survival mode to high gear.

But it's not all that easy for the government to make loans and sales opportunities available. If legislators are serious about offering real help, they will makes sure they anticipate any potential roadblocks before they pass the bill. That means paying careful attention to the details in a way that seems to be out of style in Washington right now.

Consider what happened when the Recovery Act authorized loan application fee waivers and higher government guarantees for SBA-backed loans. This program turned out to be very popular, given banks' reluctance to lend to small business during the credit crunch. The dollar amount of SBA-guaranteed loans doubled in the most recent quarter, compared to the same one last year, The Wall Street Journal reported. However, the program has come to a halt three times until Congress authorized additional funding. That left applicants grappling with whether to move ahead on their applications and pay the steep fees - which for one business amounted to $43,000 - or to put themselves on a waiting list with the hope that more funding for the program would be forthcoming.

While the federal government says it awarded a record number of government contracts to small business owners last year, small business advocates counter that many such contracts have, historically, actually gone to big corporations in entrepreneurial clothing. The American Small Business League is suing the General Services Administration to get access to data that would help in investigating whether big companies deliberately misrepresented themselves as small in the past decade so they could go after contracts intended for small firms, according to a Washington Post report on Monday.

This doesn't mean that government is incapable of offering real help to the small business community. It simply underlines how important it is for legislators to get this bill right, so it works as planned.

As a nation that is depending on hiring by small business to pave the way out of the recession, we can't afford any new measures to help them that don't work well and chip away their confidence. Usually known for perennial optimism, they are pretty pessimistic right now, especially about Washington. They need to see that legislators who know how to get things done right are on their side.

A survey of small business owners released Monday found that 49% see the federal government as moderately to highly unsupportive toward small business. Only 5% see it as very supportive, according to the findings by e-mail marketing company Constant Contact and collaborators such as the American Chamber of Commerce Executives, the Association of Small Business Development Centers, and SCORE.

It's going to take some smart policymaking to get small business owners feeling positive again. The National Federation of Independent Business's Index of Small Business Optimism which was released yesterday, fell in March, despite recent economic growth. "Poor sales and uncertainty continue to overwhelm any other good news about the economy," said Bill Dunkelberg, NFIB's chief economist.

If this new bill provides some real help, it could turn around the mood of the nation's entrepreneurs. Once they feel ready to start growing their businesses again, that will give other Americans something to feel optimistic about: more jobs.

Source:  http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/will-the-new-small-business-bill-do-the-trick-maybe/38957/

Perhaps you’re familiar with the various signs of the apocalypse.  You know: plagues of locusts, lakes of fire and Oprah getting jiggy with John Tesh. Horrific as those images may be, small-business owners seem more frightened by the current economic picture. Two new surveys - one from Discover, the other from the National Federation of Independent Business - show that, whatever rousing talk from Ben Bernanke about “moderate recovery” (strike up the band!), small-business people think conditions are hovering around 4th-and-20. The Discover research says 53 percent of owners believe the economy will get worse in the next six months and the study by NFIB is more negative: it notes that even in the depths of the 1982 recession, 47 percent of small-business people figured conditions would improve, whereas now the number who say the same is minus 8. (Which goes to show that, whatever you say about Yanni’s “Chameleon Days” tour - Tesh on keys! - the ’80s were a damn good era.

Will work for free. In other downbeat news, jobsites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder are reporting a significant increase in the number of adults willing to do unpaid internships. And companies are happy to take them up on it. A for-profit firm accepting volunteers is illegal, of course. So if you’re currently unemployed and you want to work in a blogger’s world, shoot us your CV. (We haven’t turned a profit in years.)

SBA: what’s the big idea? So asks frequent correspondent Lloyd Chapman, president of the American Small Business League, who last week filed suit against the SBA for refusing to release information related to its close ties with large corporations. Regular followers of this blog (pipe down back there!) are familiar with the story. For years the SBA has been ladling out federal contracts earmarked for small firms to companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and British Aerospace. Now, embarrassed by the attention stirred by Chapman, the GAO and others, the SBA is cranking up the smoke machine. It recently paid $30,000 for a sit-down with APCO Worldwide, a multinational PR firm that specializes in crisis management. (Your tax dollars at work.)

Source: http://www.allbusiness.com/company-activities-management/company-structures-ownership/14279626-1.html