Platform for a 21st Century Hickory - Helping Small Business, Start-ups, and Entrepreneurs

5) We need to do what we can to help small business, start up businesses, and local Entrepreneurs move forward. This encourages entrepreneurship, which puts people to work. We will find a way to create and facilitate a microlending-entrepreneurial plan in this community. We think this is a vital mission and purpose that the city's Business Development Commission should embrace.

The BDC needs to be diverse and aggressive in its work. Marketing and promoting current business is fine, but it will not grow an economy that has lost thousands of jobs over the last several years. The BDC should be trying to attract “magnet” large businesses and focus on Cluster and Niche Economic Development that feeds off of the manufacturing and technical service skills of local citizens. This will generate “spin off” supportive small businesses. The Goal would be to expand and empower the scope of the BDC to facilitate tangible Economic Activity.

Hickory City Government has stood in the way of all of this. Rudy Wright has specifically stood in the way of this as he espoused on Hal Row's radio show in May 2011. The City Manager actually told a local citizen that it was illegal for Hickory Incorporated to get involved in a Microlending function, even though there are other local governments and other governmental agencies involved in such Economic Mechanisms/Activities.



This is a new day and we must think in a new way!