Congressmember Carolyn Maloney drives home a point at her Town Hall meeting at the Cretan’s Association of Omonia in Astoria on Saturday, March 6. Photo Bryan Lamaj Congressmember Carolyn Maloney held a town hall meeting March 6 on the current economic situation, gathering a panel of public and private officials who in general spoke of working with government to try to alleviate current employment difficulties for individuals and businesses. Speaking at the Cretan’s Association of Omonia on 31st Street in Astoria, Maloney stressed that the main theme of the day is jobs. She conducted a fast review of the economic downturn of the past two years and said that the situation has been bad but is getting better. In the general bad time, she said, she and her audience could be proud of the project to connect the Long Island Rail Road with Manhattan’s East Side and Grand Central Terminal, and the redevelopment of Queens Plaza, for which project she secured tens of millions of dollars from Washington.

The panel members were Man-li Kuo Lin of the New York office of the Small Business Administration; Angie Kamath of Small Business Services; Michele Mattingly of the Fiscal Policy Institute; Denise Richardson of the General Contractors Association; Alex Saavedra of SEEDCO, and Matthew Silverstein of America Works.

Lin explained three SBA programs, the first of which works with banks to arrange loans to small businesses but demands an outline of ability to repay. She said there would be a booth where small business persons could “meet the lenders” at the jobs fair being held Wednesday, April 7, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at Queens Crossing on Main Street in Flushing. The SBA also deals now in microlending, to get people started in business from a particularly small fiscal base. With $15 million in fiscal stimulus funding, microlending programs are conducted out of a few schools such as York College and LaGuardia Community College. The third program is one in training and education for starting a business, home-based enterprises particularly stressed. Lin said part of this program is the SBA’s offer of more than 100 free online courses on getting started.

Kamath spoke mainly of the SBS NYC Workforce development programs. There are 10 workforce centers in the city, four of them in Queens, she said. Last year, 160,000 people “walked through” them, to use her term. The Queens centers are big on health care, transportation and general career programs and work through such outlets as the Queens Borough Public Library and the East River Development Association. Some money goes to such private businesses as food service for training and studying how to improve efficiency. She said NYC Workforce has put 10,000 people back to work, asserting in addition that they gain higher pay as a result of being in the program. She said that the response from business is so strong that “there’s literally a job fair every day”.

Mattingly said that the FPI collects and analyzes data. Recent analyses include the impact of stimulus funding on the city and also job growth trends and job creation. The job picture for New York in the next few years is not a bright one, she noted. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has said that through 2016, jobs gained in the city would be primarily in the fields of home care, health care and retail: low-paying, bottom-level jobs, and to them on the growth list could be added janitorial and other cleaning work. Even then, they would improve the unemployment numbers that obtain at present. She said that with the unemployment rate at 10.4 percent at the end of January the situation is manifestly bad, and worse if one realizes that 46 percent of the jobless have been unemployed for at least six months. The quest for improvement looks grim when, as she pointed out, the city must gain 400,000 jobs in the next five years just to get back to where matters stood in the middle of 2009. She is of the belief that since the recession is national; we must look to the federal government to help us get out of it. With that in mind, she said, tax credits for job creation must aim for a net increase in payroll and economic development subsidies must be transparent. Good jobs at fair wages are the way to build the middle class, she concluded.

Richardson of the GCA said that construction was once strong in the city, but not at the present time. She offered an anecdote about a recent bid offered on one project, saying that one man making a bid told her his company had no work for hire at present, so his bid was desperate. He did not win the bid, but it turned out that the company that did was similarly out of work for hire. Everyone is desperate, Richardson concluded. But, like Maloney she saw the East Side Access project as a bright spot, which should alleviate the park-andride burden imposed on Long Island City by suburban drivers. She also said that because of the workers it has been good for Astoria restaurants, but in the main, those establishments are suffering considerably. She did report, though, that, perhaps in the spring, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is to announce a small business-mentoring program to teach contractors how to work in the MTA environment.

Saavedra said SEEDCO exists to find a range of finance opportunities for its clients, who are all in small business. He said that in such tough times as these one must “learn how to tap opportunities”. One of them might be green jobs. There are many of them, he said, such as retrofitting, which hard-pressed businessmen ought to consider and unemployed persons ought to train for. Matthew Silverstein said America Works is private but got stimulus money because it works with “hardest to place” individuals: persons on welfare, released convicts and, beginning recently, military veterans, owing largely to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s insistence they be included in such a program.

The only panelist to elicit a question was Richardson. She was asked how one might become a contractor. She spoke as a representative of an association that deals only with unionized businesses seeking public works, but in that context she advised that most of the public work sources such as the MTA advise bidders what is required for the bid at hand. The School Construction Authority, however, considers only bidders that are on its list as qualified, and to get on that list requires passing an SCA test.

The rest of the questions seemed to be all for Maloney and the bulk of them covered health care. Maloney took only written and submitted questions, but that didn’t prevent a man, then a woman from beginning to shout questions containing their own answers from the back of the room. The time was growing late, so Maloney closed the town hall session.