Political Quotes

“I am happy and proud to join my senior Senator in congratulating our friend Mark Hayward, the District Director of the Small Business Administration in Rhode Island, on his very well-deserved retirement after serving at SBA for more than 40 years. It is a really remarkable career. In that time, as Jack said, Mark strengthened small businesses all across the Ocean State and created economic opportunity for Rhode Islanders from every community and background. He was so well regarded within the SBA that he was actually called down to Washington for a detail to help break in a new Small Business Administrator who needed to learn the ropes. The person that the organization trusted to get her going and working in a good way was Mark Hayward. Of course, he came back to New England and back to Rhode Island. Jack mentioned Mark's role in the pandemic. He had actually told us he was planning to retire before the pandemic, but he couldn't walk away from what was happening. So he went to work to make sure that Rhode Island did a good job in the pandemic. It was not easy. These were big new programs that we had created, and implementing them and getting the money to flow smoothly through the banks and undoing the clogs that emerged and the different errors that were experienced was a big project. Mark made Rhode Island a model of good implementation of our pandemic response. Other SBA offices around the country looked to what he was doing and modeled on that.…”