Speeches

Remarks as prepared for delivery: Brian P. McGowan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development, City of Anaheim EDA Grant Check Announcement, Anaheim, California

AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY

Thank you, Todd, for the kind introduction.

I am very happy to be here in my home state of California and am so pleased to be working with Mayor Curt Pringle again. He has been a friend, a mentor and a supporter over the years - so Curt, I thank you for that.

I would also like to thank the members of the Anaheim City Council for joining us today and for your efforts to boost business development and job growth in southern California.

Len Smith, our Director of EDA's Seattle Regional Office, is also here with us today. Thank you, Len, for your leadership at EDA and for helping to create jobs and economic opportunity across the west coast and elsewhere.

As a member of the Obama Administration's economic team, I am proud to be working to implement the President's ambitious agenda to turn the economy around, put people back to work, and provide economic security for every American.

The President has taken bold steps to secure America's economic future. The administration's policies have brought stability to our financial system and have begun to restore confidence in the economy.

The President's comprehensive Recovery Act has stopped the economic free fall we were in; provided tax relief to millions of families; and is laying a new foundation to secure America's competitiveness in the 21st century global economy.

But the President knows we've got a long way to go, based on last week's jobs report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This Administration will not consider the country to be at full recovery until every single American who wants a job - can get one.

At the Department of Commerce, Secretary Locke is committed to getting people back to work by helping businesses grow and by advocating for our nation's economic competitiveness.

To further these priorities, Secretary Locke recently announced plans to create a new "Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship" within the Department. This new office will focus specifically driving policies and programs to ease access to government resources for entrepreneurs in order to help them translate new ideas, products, and services into economic growth.

In addition, this week, Secretary Locke announced a major new program to help companies grow and create jobs at a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open the Department of Commerce's first one-stop shop, named CommerceConnect, at Plymouth, Michigan.

CommerceConnect brings together under one roof all the Department of Commerce's services to make it easier for local businesses and entrepreneurs to access them. Experts will assess a business' full spectrum of needs, whether it's access to capital, intellectual property protection, export promotion or guidance on how to make operations more efficient to help businesses compete at every point of their life cycle.

Based on the success of the Michigan shop, the Secretary plans to continue to roll out these important business resource shops in cities across the country.

This administration's policies and initiatives accentuate our belief that America's creative thinkers and innovators must lead the way to global economic recovery. And it's my belief that California will show everyone how to get there.

At the Economic Development Administration, we are also working with this philosophy in mind by focusing on grants that will accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship to advance regional competitiveness; create higher-skill, higher-wage jobs; generate private investment and fortify and grow industry clusters.

The grant we present today will help create jobs in the Anaheim Canyon Corridor by making the critical infrastructure improvements needed to link the area directly to the Anaheim Metrolink Station via East La Palma Avenue.

These improvements will ease pedestrian access to the new Kaiser Permanente hospital complex and the PacificCenter retail project and will help open new industrial sites - all creating a vibrant transit-oriented industrial and retail district. The city expects the project to create 1,900 jobs and generate $570 million in private investment.

EDA is proud of its work with the City of Anaheim and I am glad to be here to celebrate a project that will bring new hope and new jobs to the Anaheim Canyon Corridor.

So now, if I could please have Mayor Pringle and the rest of today's speakers join me…

On behalf of the President of the United States, it is my pleasure to present the city of Anaheim with this check for $7.2 million. Congratulations.