Arlington Heights trustees satisfied with small business retention program

Two years into an outreach program to retain more small businesses in Arlington Heights, village trustees Tuesday expressed general satisfaction with its progress but also said they wanted more detailed descriptions of individual examples.

The Small Business Development Agreement is a partnership between with the Arlington Heights Chamber of Commerce toward which the village pays $50,000 per year.

Village President Thomas Hayes said the program was one he wanted to pursue two years ago because he believed the business friendliness of Arlington Heights had begun to slip.

"The better our business community, the better we can do as a board in keeping property taxes low," Hayes said. "The success of any one of our businesses is felt by the village as well."

But the report given Tuesday by the chamber's Director of Business Development Jim Platt was everything Hayes said he'd hoped to hear after the partnership began.

Four small business owners testified during Tuesday's report of the help they'd personally received from Platt in understanding Arlington Heights' business codes sufficiently to either open, relocate or expand in the village.

Signs By Tomorrow owner Gerd Looff had already been operating in Arlington Heights for 14 years but said all the information he came across seemed to indicate that relocating to another suburb was the best option for an expansion.

But Looff said that Platt helped him understand the village codes better and led him to the conclusion that opening in a new Arlington Heights location on East Davis Street would be better for him after all.

Village trustees, who'd earlier had only Platt's written report of the number of visits to small businesses he'd made in the past two years, said they wanted more narratives like Looff's to be provided to them in written form.

But both Hayes and Village Manager Randy Recklaus cautioned that the overall impact of Platt's work remained more important to the village's goals than hundreds of individual stories.

"We want to hear common threads," Hayes said.

The village committed to three years of the partnership and will decide on its longer-term future a year from now.