(LONE TREE, CO)– Continuing his outreach with small businesses in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District, U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Aurora, today announced that he will focus his efforts to determine what the small businesses need to create more jobs.
“Congressman Cory Gardner, who represents Colorado's 4th Congressional District, came up with a brilliant strategy for focusing on small business job creation. He calls itOne More Job and what he does is contact the small business owners in his district to ask them what specific conditions are necessary for them to create ‘one more job’ in their respective small businesses,” Coffman said.
The One More Job initiative is the latest salvo in Coffman’s campaign to combat unemployment in the 6th District. Throughout 2011, Coffman organized and held events to seek input from businesses throughout the 6th District on how best to create an environment where they can create jobs. As chairman of the House Small Business Subcommittee on Investigations, Oversight and Regulations, Coffman held an official Congressional hearing in Greenwood Village to determine what could be done to start the flow of credit from community banks to small businesses again.
Coffman, a former small business owner, also made it a priority in 2011 to talk with as many entrepreneurs in his district as possible. Coffman hosted a small business listening session last spring where over a dozen small business owners came together for a roundtable discussion about fostering an atmosphere of economic expansion and job growth. In the autumn of 2011, Coffman toured a variety of small businesses throughout the 6th District to hear their concerns about the current economic climate.
“I started a small business after I came home from the Marine Corps in 1983 and remained a small business owner for the next 17 years,” Coffman said. “I've always felt that the focus of economic development policies, at every level, has been on catering to large businesses while often ignoring small businesses.”
“It makes for a great press release when an elected official can say that ‘they’ created so many jobs by giving subsidies and tax breaks to a large business, but it’s not a story when the same number, if not many more jobs are created, by simply having the right ‘pro-growth’ economic policies in place that equally benefit all businesses,” Coffman said. “Nobody gets credit for that except for the worker who gets the job, his family, and the taxpayer who isn’t stuck with the bill.”
Coffman said he like the strategy because it expanded on his previous efforts of small business outreach, but had a laser-like focus on quantifying what specifically needs to be done to create jobs in small businesses which have historically been the engine of economic growth in the United States. Coffman will solicit hundreds of small businesses for input in the coming weeks on topics ranging from tax code and regulatory reform to improving access to capital.
“I've been meeting with firms of every size in the district to talk about job creation, but I like this specific focus on small businesses creating ‘one more job’ and I'm going to adopt it for this district,” Coffman said.
