THE SHOALS – “I get it,” Governor Robert Bentley told the business owners in the packed meeting room, “Alabama prospers when our small businesses are doing well.”
Bentley was in town Friday to attend the Alabama Music Hall of Fame Awards Banquet. But one who doesn’t like to let grass grown under his feet, the Governor scheduled meetings at the Shoals Chamber and the Shoals Entrepreneurial Center so that he could touch the pulse of business leaders here. It was another meeting in the continuum of Bentley’s “Road to Economic Recovery Tour” of reaching out and sensing the pulse of business leaders across the state.
A regular part of Bentley’s outreach is to field questions from participants, which he did here. Questions ranged the usual gamut of small-business concerns from health care; to taxes; to the accessing of government jobs. Bentley added, “The best way of helping small businesses suceed is for the State to keep outdated regulations away, while at the same time providing assistance when the Government can actually do some good.
After the meeting at the Chamber, Governor Bentley’s motorcade drove up to the Florence Industrial Park to visit a small business which has its offices at the Shoals Entrepreneurial Center. Entrepreneurial Center Executive Director, Giles McDaniel led the tour of the facility and introduced Governor Bentley to James Bowles of B Electric. An example of how the Entrepreneurial Center incubates small companies with big ideas, B Electric is in the planning stages of moving out of the Center and into its own new facility. Bowles went into detail with Governor Bentley about the Center’s shot-in-the-arm to his company.
