After traveling to Fort Belvoir, Culpeper and Frederickburg on Thursday, Senator Warner spent Friday morning in the Northern Neck and on the Middle Peninsula, visiting with business and community leaders in Westmoreland and Essex Counties.
During a morning round table discussion at the Art of Coffee in Montross and an afternoon luncheon in Tappahannock, Senator Warner sat down and talked with small business owners and community bankers about their concerns and priorities.
The Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star was there:
Warner said his major goal these days is to increase the availability of loans for small businesses. Helping small businesses grow would increase jobs, he said.
He said one way of doing that would be to cut red tape at the Small Business Administration and "make SBA programs more user-friendly" to both borrowers and banks.
Warner said another way could be a White House proposal to provide $30 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to community banks for small-business lending.
A third idea would be to allow banks to join together in loss-reserve pools.
"This would give banks a cushion and an incentive to make loans to customers with less-than-perfect credit," Warner said.
"Whatever we do, we need to do it fast," said Warner. "A lot of small businesses that have been just hanging on for the past 18 months might not be around long."
"We're not going to dig ourselves out overnight," he said. "But I promise you that I will keep working to make sure spending is controlled in the long-term."
Here is a report from the road:
RELATED An update on Fort Belvoir Senator Warner traveled to Fort Belvoir on February 18 to receive an update from base commanders and officials from the Army Corps of Engineers on the BRAC-related base expansion and to tour the new hospital construction site.
"I'm not ready to throw in the towel" Senator Warner was back on the road February 18 and met with business and community leaders in Culpeper and Fredericksburg to provide an update from Washington.
Senator Warner is in Boston today to speak with business leaders and students at Harvard’s Kennedy School about his ongoing efforts to find consensus on a big, bipartisan debt reduction plan.
It’s not easy limiting a politician to answers of 140 characters or less, so we had a lot of fun today helping Senator Warner conduct his first Twitter Town Hall. As the co-founder of Nextel and a former venture capitalist, the Senator appreciates the role of new technology and he’s a big fan of social media.
Backlogs and delays continue to plague the federal government's pension system. Retirees wait an average of five months to receive their first full pension check -- but delays of a year or more are common. The Office of Personnel Management says it has plan to hire more people to process a backlog of 64,000 paper records, but it could take 18 months or more to solve the problem.
"I agree with the President: To jumpstart our economic recovery, we must work together to boost jobs and investments in manufacturing and refocus our efforts on quality job training and rebuilding American infrastructure. I was pleased to see the President endorse several elements of my bipartisan efforts to promote entrepreneurship and cut government duplication and waste."
Virginia civil rights legend Rev. Curtis Harris, Sr. will be Senator Warner’s guest at tonight’s State of the Union address from the President. Rev. Harris, 87, was a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He “spent much of the 1960s and '70s picketing, marching, confronting Ku Klux Klansmen, filing lawsuits and occasionally getting tossed in jail while fighting for equality,” according to the Richmond Times Dispatch.
Five weeks after demanding results from the Navy over inadequate conditions in military housing, Senator Warner returned to Hampton Roads today to examine repairs made to Lincoln Military Housing properties that affected by mold and water damage.
Senator Warner joined Governor Bob McDonnell on Thursday to launch a new digital literacy program that'l be provided free to Virginia middle school students. My Digital Life teaches 8th and 9th graders how to avoid revealing too much about themselves online, and suggests ways to use the Internet responsibly and safely.
Senator Warner today applauded the President’s announcement that he will promote international tourism by issuing an executive order to speed the processing of tourist visas. I commend the President on this encouraging step toward promoting tourism by reforming the visa process for international visitors. Tourism brings $1.25 billion in revenue to Virginia annually.
Around the world, more than two-billion people are at serious health risks every day due to the lack of clean drinking water, and many of those people live in India. Senator Warner was on-hand today as the 16,000 inhabitants of the poor Indian village of Kompally got access to reliable, safe drinking water for the first time.
The billion-plus people of India are experiencing phenomenal growth in their middle class, yet millions currently live in poverty in crowded urban slums. That was a focus of Senator Mark Warner’s visit today as he continues to lead a five-member congressional trip to India.
You don’t see this every day: a United States senator and a former NBA player, spreading the gospel of team sports and healthy lifestyles to young people – in New Delhi, India. That’s what Senator Mark Warner and former NBA star Muggsy Bogues did today on the first day of Senator Warner’s week-long congressional visit to try to increase economic and cultural ties between the United States and India.
Senator Warner, co-chair of the Senate’s India Caucus, will lead a five-member congressional delegation on a visit to India between Jan. 7 and Jan. 14. The delegation will meet with top government and business leaders in New Dehli, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Kolkata, exploring opportunities to expand business, trade, defense and cultural relationships between the two countries.
We recently received a pleasant surprise in Senator Warner’s incoming mail: a bunch of handwritten thank you notes from more than a dozen students at William Monroe Middle School in Greene County. The students visited the U.S. Capitol on National History Day last fall with their librarian and teacher, Mary Craig.
The Army released a report today on discrepancies and misplaced headstones at Arlington National Cemetery after an almost year-long study of management issues at the cemetery. The review found that nearly one-fourth – or 64,000 - of the 260,000 grave markers at Arlington may need to be replaced or fixed.
On Monday, Senator Warner met with about 15 small-business owners at Café Stella in Norfolk to hear their concerns about jobs and the economy. Click here to watch video of their meeting.
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