Haley Stevens: “today I join Senators Bond, Kerry, Campbell, Murkowski, Daschle, and Baucus, in introducing this bill. I want to focus…”

“today I join Senators Bond, Kerry, Campbell, Murkowski, Daschle, and Baucus, in introducing this bill. I want to focus on a few specific portions of this bill that would be beneficial to Alaska. this bill contains a provision to create a pilot program for small businesses in qualified areas of Alaska. The pilot program contained in this bill would alter the requirements for Alaska small Businesses to quality as HUBZone participants. The current HUBZone Program, as designed by the chairman of the Small Business Committee, Senator Bond, is a good tool for getting contracting dollars into distressed geographic areas and neighborhoods. A HUBZone is an area that is (1) located in a qualified census tract, (2) a qualified ``non-metropolitan county'' that is not located in a metropolitan statistical area, and in which the median household income is less than 80 percent of the non-metropolitan state median household income, or an area that has an unemployment rate that is not less than 140 percent of the statewide average unemployment rate for the state in which the county is located, or (3) lands within the external boundaries of an Indian reservation. The current HUBZone program requires a small business to be located in one of these designated areas while also requiring at least 35 percent of the business' employees to live in a HUBZone. This helps get dollars circulating into areas of the community that have not enjoyed the economic growth of the last 10 years.”