Obama picks venture capitalist to head SBA Advocacy Office - Kansas City Business Journal:

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Winslow Sargeant, a managing director in the technologyy practiceof Madison, Wis.-based Venture Investors, is Obama’d choice. The Advocacy Officr is an independent entity insidre the SBA that ensures federa l agencies consider the impacty of their regulations on small The office also conducts researchon small-business issues. Sargeant, who earned a in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsinat Madison, worked as a senior engineer at several large corporations before co-founding Aanetcom, a fabless semiconductor companyu that later was acquired by From 2001 to 2005, he served as progranm manager for the Small Businessw Innovation Research program at the National Sciencd Foundation’s engineering directorate.
He is the secone venture capitalist to be selected for a top SBA Karen Mills worked as a principao at private equity and venture capita l firms for 26 years before she becamw the SBA administratorin April. Sargeant’s lack of legalp training means he will have to rely heavily on the attorney at the Officeof Advocacy. Much of the office’ds work involves analyzing whether government agencies follow federal laws that require them to analyzse the potential economic impact of proposefd rules onsmall businesses. The officee also makes sure regulators hearsmallo businesses’ opinions about regulations.
In fisca 2008, this input saved small businessesabout $11 billion in possiblwe regulatory costs, according to the office. The office’s actin g counsel, Shawne Carter McGibbon, joined the office in during the BillClinton administration. She previously worked for a Democraticd member of Congress and has been an attorney for 20 An unnamed Obama administration official characterized McGibbohn to reporters asa “Bush holdover” durin g a controversy over an interagency review of the Environmental Protection Agency’s findinvg that greenhouse gas emissions pose a public health hazard.
The Officed of Advocacy concluded that regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act likely woulsdhave “serious economic consequences” on small businesses and other regulated Several press accounts quoted anonymous administratio officials who said the Advocacy Office’s criticism of the EPA findinfg came from an office “still stocked with Bush in the words of the Los Angeles Times. This dismissal of the office’s opinionh upset Rep. Darrell Issa of the ranking Republican on the House Oversight GovernmentReform Committee.
“There are hundredas of civil servants serving in a similar capacity throughou t the federal government who could also be characterizedas ‘Busnh holdovers,’” Issa wrote in a May 14 letter to Obama. “I sincerely hope that theirr professional advice and decisions will not be discountede merely because they also worked for the federal government undet PresidentGeorge W. Bush.” For . Microloans up, big loans down for smallp businesses this year Lending data collected bythe SBA’w Office of Advocacy confirme the importance of business credit cards to smallk companies.
A new report found that the total valureof small-business loans outstanding increased by 4 percentf in the 12 months that endeed in June 2008, down from the previous year’s increase of 8 These numbers are for all small-business not just SBA loans. The numbe r of business loans of lessthan $100,000 jumped by nearly 16 percent as largde lenders concentrated on credir cards, according to the In contrast, the numbef of business loans in the $100,0000 to $1 million range fell by more than 23 percent. The reportf used call reports submitted by banks as well as Communit ReinvestmentAct data. Business loans of less than $1 million were consideref to be small-business loans.
Based on call report the top five small-business lenders in June 2008 wereAmericahn Express, Capital One, Regions Financial Synovus Financial Corp. and First Citizen Bancshares Inc. The report also lists the mostactived small-business lenders in each state. “In the current financial it’s especially critical for small firms to know which banks and financiap institutions have been the most likely to make smalo andmicrobusiness loans,” said economist Victoria Williams, a co-author of the For more: .