Welcome to the Finance Fund Blog!

Small business owners and entrepreneurs often contact Finance Fund after they’ve been turned down for a traditional bank loan. We work hard to find ways to partner with traditional lenders and leverage grants and other forms of funding to make financing for these folks possible.  It’s often difficult, complex work, but extremely rewarding. Finance Fund looks for potential in projects to help underserved communities thrive.

This week, Finance Fund joined forces with the Columbus Chamber of Commerce to provide small- to medium-sized business owners with a webinar on how to access capital and credit.

As part of the panel discussion, “Funding Opportunities for Small Businesses,” I highlighted Finance Fund’s Community Health Loan Fund, SBA Intermediary Lending and SBA Community Advantage programs. In addition, the webinar helped participants learn how to qualify for US Treasury tax credit and loan opportunities and grants available through the Ohio Department of Development.

If you missed the live webinar, you may want to watch the archived post on the Columbus Chamber website.  Please contact us with your ideas. http://vimeo.com/columbuschamber/review/63771929/b6e2aa9903

With the advent of the Affordable Care Act, there will be a significant gap between the number of community-based health care (CHC) facilities projects planned and the projected demand for services in low-income communities.

The Affordable Care Act’s goal is to serve 40 million patients – that’s double the number of people CHCs currently serve in more than 8,500 communities nationwide. According to a report prepared by Capital Link, 76% of CHCs have plans to initiate a capital project within five years, estimated to cost $5.7 billion and serve about 6,600 providers and 6.9 million patients. To reach the goal of serving 40 million patients, the total capital need is $13.1 billion, with facilities and equipment estimated to cost $7.4 billion.

Finance Fund’s new $6 million Community Health Loan (CHL) Fund was established to provide community-based health care centers access to affordable, flexible financing for expansion, renovation and equipment purchases.

Attendees at the 2013 Annual Spring Conference of the Ohio Association of Community Healthcare Centers (OACHC) were among the first to learn of the new CHL Fund. In our presentation “Finance Fund Community Health Loan Fund: Prescription for Healthier Communities,” Program Loan Officer Tara Campbell and I described the current and future state of healthcare access.

Use of the CHL Fund will enable community-based health care centers, doctors, dentists, CHCs and federally qualified community health centers (FQHC) to provide primary care, dental, behavioral and preventative health care services to the growing number of uninsured, underinsured and low-income people in Ohio.

The CHL Fund was made possible by visionary funders who saw and acted upon the need:  The HealthPath Foundation of Ohio, PNC Bank, The Greater Cincinnati Foundation, Ohio Development Services Agency and Finance Fund Capital Corporation.

We were in good company at the conference. This important topic drew 200 attendees and a wide range of nationally recognized exhibitors including Cardinal Health, Molina Healthcare, Merck & Co, and LabCorp.

Congress is ideologically polarized to the point where it’s seemingly impossible to get any “big deals” done. The most we can hope for, and expect, is that the remnants of compromise will enable enough small deals to happen to facilitate basic operation of the government. Until the character of Congress changes, this seems to be the only path of least resistance.

The political conscience of Congress has long since adopted the ideology of personal responsibility and abandoned that of corporate accountability. As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson phrased it in their book Winner-Take-All-Politics, “A rising tide lifts all yachts.”

A panel of community development experts reached this consensus at the 2013 CDFI Coalition Institute’s conference in Washington D.C. last week. I moderated this “Federal Budget and Tax Reform” discussion at the conference’s opening session. Not surprisingly, the primary topics of the panel were all about the money and included:

–The sequestration
–The continuing resolution due to expire on March 27
–The President’s FY 2014 Budget expected out in early March
–Tax reform discussions gaining steam in Congress

Bob Rapoza, Rapoza Associates; Katherine Morris, CohenReznick; and Eileen Fitzgerald, NeighborWorks America, provided insight into the potential impact of budget and deficit reduction measures.The conference attracted community development leaders from across the nation to discuss federal policy issues facing CDFIs. Conference attendees also met with Congressional members on Capitol Hill to share their recommendations.

Sequestration’s Potential Impacts
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that if the Budget Control Act’s automatic spending cuts remain in effect, they would reduce government spending deficits by at least $1.2 trillion over ten years, from 2012 to 2021.

Cuts are divided between defense-related and domestic spending. On the domestic side, cuts will affect health care, unemployment benefits, non-profit organization funds, education, law enforcement, disaster relief, scientific research and more. No funding cuts are allocated for Medicaid, Social Security, Pell grants, veterans’ benefits and some low-income programs.

The White House  estimates that under sequestration:

–The government’s small business loan guarantees would get slashed by more than $900 million
–More than 100,000 formerly homeless people will lose their current housing
–Checks for unemployed people looking for work would shrink by up to nine percent
–About 125,000 low-income families would be at risk of losing their housing because of rental assistance cuts
–Care for up to 373,000 seriously mentally ill  people would be eliminated
–About 70,000 children would lose access to early education through Head Start
–Up to 2,100 fewer food inspections could occur, putting families at risk and costing billions in lost food production
–Several thousand researchers could lose their jobs and up to 12,000 scientists and students would also be impacted

Contact Your Congressional Representative
We encourage you to share your concerns about the impacts of these cuts on economic development and the most vulnerable members of our society by writing to your Congressional representative.

A $20,000 pre-development grant from Finance Fund will be used to create marketing materials that reposition Parsons Avenue and attract investment following a generation of decline. A diverse mix of stakeholders is working to revitalize the area on Columbus’ south side into a vibrant residential and commercial corridor.

When neighborhood groups, government and nonprofit organizations join with the private sector, very good things can happen. This is the type of grassroots redevelopment effort that gets our juices flowing.

Community Development for All People (CD4AP) is leading the Parsons Avenue redevelopment effort and already has the primary building blocks in place. CD4AP is working with partner Arch City Development to create environmentally sustainable and affordable housing, a workforce development program and a charitable pharmacy. In addition, it has taken over social service programs previously administered by a former settlement house.

Now, the group is promoting the neighborhood’s commercial development potential. The marketing material, aimed at attracting developers, features five successful Parsons Avenue businesses. Highlights include a special message from Donato’s pizza founder Jim Grote who is a south side native. It also features Nationwide Children’s Hospital, which recently completed an $850 million expansion and is the area’s largest area property owner.

We applaud this broad, comprehensive and thoughtful approach to community redevelopment, and even more importantly, we are supporting it with grant funding to create materials that tell the Parsons Avenue story.

Developers interested in exploring opportunities on the Parsons Avenue corridor may wish to contact Brian Higgins bhiggins@archcitydevelopment.com. The neighborhood west of Parsons has a median household income of $61,000+ and a desirable housing market. In addition, just north of the primary commercial corridor, Nationwide Children’s Hospital employs 8,500 medical professionals, allied and support staff (who are potential customers) and attracts nearly one million annual visitors. A new CVS pharmacy, two traditional restaurants and a vegan restaurant/bar are now serving the area.

Finance Fund is pleased to award $12.8 million in federal and $2.56 million in state New Market Tax Credit (NMTC) financing to Ironville to expand operations at the Toledo Port’s Midwest Terminal. PNC New Markets Investment Partners, LLC, the investor, provided an additional $2.5 million federal allocation.

The new construction project is located in a low-income census tract with a 17% poverty rate. It will create 40 permanent jobs and 160 construction jobs in an area where unemployment is approaching 13%.

The Port of Toledo t is one of the busiest operations on the St. Lawrence Seaway System. It’s within 20 hours drive time of 72% of the U.S. population. The 15 terminals are open 365 days of the year and handle 12 million tons of cargo annually including coal, cement, petroleum and grain.

New Market Tax Credit investment in this type of multi-modal, gateway project will have long-term positive impact on economic development, job creation and commerce throughout the Midwest.

There’s something exciting about a bustling seaport.  Cargo comes in from all over the world and is offloaded onto trucks, rail, other ships and planes to continue its journey to businesses – and finally find its way into our lives. So the next time you gas up your car or enjoy a slice of whole grain bread, think about the journey that these products have made to get to you and how Finance Fund helped make that journey possible.