After Tumultuous Start, SBA Empowers Watts With Financial Center

After six years of planning and politicking, it has at last come to pass.

The Small Business Administration has opened its Los Angeles One Stop Capital Shop, teaming up with the city to give entrepreneurs in the Watts area a place to turn for everything from help with business plans to loan processing to information on city contract opportunities.

A parade of politicians Friday launched the small office at the Watts Civic Center on Compton Boulevard. The opening, which trails many others around the country by years, marks a milestone for the once-devastated community.

“We cannot move forward with this unprecedented economic expansion and leave other people behind,” SBA Administrator Aida Alvarez told the crowd.

The benefits to Watts are clear, but the launch comes laden with baggage. While other cities were putting their SBA-initiated small business financial centers together in federally designated empowerment zones, the Los Angeles plans dragged out as the SBA searched for a partner.

The agency initially planned to house the center at the Community Financial Resource Center, which provides financial services and counseling to small businesses in South Los Angeles. But last-minute disputes killed that deal after equipment had already been moved in.

Another partnership with USC’s Business Expansion Network also failed and the SBA turned to Mayor Richard Riordan’s Minority Business Opportunity Committee, which links women and minority entrepreneurs with contract opportunities.

The alliance with the SBA was “a hard partnership to develop,” concedes Deputy Mayor Rocky Delgadillo, because the organizing and financing of the One Stop Capital Shop fell to the committee. But the SBA brings other strengths to the table: its business information center and relationships with lenders, who now dominate the entity’s 17-member board of directors headed by Wells Fargo Bank.

Still, the center falls short of early dreams, born in 1994 along with President Clinton’s Empowerment Zone initiative to bolster the most neglected pockets of urban America. The center is much smaller than initially envisioned and does not serve the entire empowerment zone with comprehensive lending services not offered anywhere else.

However, for U.S. Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-Carson), who pushed for the center and whose district includes Watts, it is a milestone.

“We see all small steps as a beginning,” she said. “For Watts it’s a first.”

Watts has improved notably since the 1992 riots. In addition to new retail outlets that have spruced up the neighborhood, entrepreneurs there now have access to this storefront shop of business services to help them launch and expand their operations.

A healthier economy has enticed lenders into communities like Watts, and into partnerships with a host of nonprofits that now offer similar services to the One Stop.

“To the extent there’s nothing like it in Watts, it can be a very good thing,” said Roberto Barragan, executive director of the Valley Economic Development Center. “[But] to think that a One Stop in Watts can serve the entire empowerment zone is being somewhat naive.”