By Dave Gatton
December 17, 2012

Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown praised the work of President Obama’s Export Council (PEC) in its December 6 meeting in Washington (DC), telling its members that modernizing the nation’s ports and assisting small businesses to enter export markets were key to continued economic growth and meeting the President’s goal of doubling exports. Brown chairs the Conference of Mayors Metro Export and Ports Task Force.

“The work of this Council is greatly appreciated by The U.S. Conference of Mayors. We are grateful to President Obama for giving the nation’s mayors a seat at the table,” he told the group, led by Boeing Chairman James McNerney. Council members present included CEOs from some of the nation’s leading export firms, such as Xerox, Dow Chemical, UPS, Verizon, Walt Disney, and Vermeer, members of Congress, and numerous Cabinet secretaries, among them former Dallas Mayor and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

“We need to eliminate the fear factor that most small businesses have in exporting,” Brown said. “They don’t have the resources, they don’t have the expertise, and they don’t have the deep pockets.”

Much of the PEC’s work has focused on this small business “fear factor.” Gene Hale, of G & C Equipment Corporation, applauded the Administration’s work on six Small and Medium Enterprizes (SMEs) roundtables that helped the PEC develop a series of 16 recommendations. “I think …the outreach so far has been commendable, but we need to institutionalize the outreach,” he said. He praised as one example the collaboration of Export/Import Bank Chair Fred Hochberg and Small Business Administrator (SBA) Karen Mills in their benchmarking of small business loans to expand exports.

Hochberg said the bank had sponsored 42 Global Access Forums to help small businesses with their export capital needs. The bank has dramatically cut the response time for credit insurance and other financial products. “We get 90 percent of all transactions out in 30 days. It was about half what it was when we started four years ago, and we get 98 percent out within 100 days, “ he said.

SBA also recently announced a new Supplier Connection program with seventeen of the world’s largest corporations to include small businesses in their supply chain. The effort will identify small companies to assist in the export process, including those companies that supply the federal government, particularly the Department of Defense.

One of the breaking issues as the PEC met was the Senate’s passage of the Russian Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) bill. The House had earlier passed the measure and the Senate’s action places U.S. companies on a competitive basis with other countries seeking to expand trade with Russia. Passage of PNTR was a top priority for the PEC.

PEC member Senator Sherrod Brown (OH) said that he would support PNTR for Russia “…because we are doing enforcement more proactively,” citing comparisons with China where he said enforcement was more retroactive. “In so many small businesses, so much damage is done to them by unfair trade practices when other countries … don’t follow the rule of law,” he said. “By the time we can respond on their behalf in partnership, whether with the ITC or Department of Commerce, the damage has already been too much inflicted on those companies and workers. So with Russia PNTR we are writing it in a way that gives us the ability, with Russian speakers in Russia, to monitor this as trade goes forward.” The Senator predicted this would “make all the difference in the world.”

During the PEC’s discussion of workforce readiness issues, Brown outlined his “Week of Valor” during Veterans Day week where Jacksonville sponsored a variety of job fairs, employment training sessions, and other events designed to train and assist Veterans in their re-entry into the workforce. “This is just the reason why we wanted to reach out to your association [U.S. Conference of Mayors]. You’ve got best practices that we can get behind,” said Boeing Chairman McNerney.

The President Obama’s Export Council met December 6 in Washington (DC) to review its work over the President’s first term and to chart its course for the next four years. The Council is led by Boeing Chairman James.