Waterloo’s small business owners are struggling. I asked whether they’d ever gotten help—or even heard from—their senators or representative in Washington, DC.
Lonnisha Robinson, president of Eddie B’s restaurant in downtown Waterloo, is struggling.
She and other Waterloo businesses are seeing higher costs for everything, and trying to stay afloat.
“Small businesses are hurting,” she told me. “Black small businesses are hurting.”
The one thing they haven’t seen? The people representing them in DC.
Recently, several candidates running for office in the upcoming election toured Black-owned businesses in Waterloo’s eastside business district, a population that usually doesn’t get much attention from state and national candidates.
I tagged along with one of them, Josh Turek, running against Ashley Hinson for US Senate. He asked about how business was going, particularly with higher prices and inflation.
Some reported they were doing OK. But others weren’t doing as well, reporting that they’ve had to lay off workers or even contemplate closing up altogether.
Landon Newman, CEO and owner of Geno’s, which moved this year to its new downtown location from the now-demolished Crossroads Mall, said costs were rising for everything.
“Are you eating that cost difference?” Turek asked.
“I have to,” said Newman.
“You’re not passing it on to customers?” Turek asked.
“I’m not putting it on the customers,” Newman said.
Down the street, Wendell Speller, co-owner of Speller’s True Value, said that was his main issue as well.
“Cost is just out of control,” he said. “We just got to end it.”
And they had some ideas for how Turek could do that.
“We need funding, we need grants,” Robinson told Turek. “Things that can help us just to be a strong restaurant.”
Speller agreed with the grants, saying it might “help the rest of the businesses that have closed in this area.”
Newman’s biggest ask was simpler:
”Check in, see what we need, see how they can be supportive,” he said.
So I asked them: Have you heard from their current US Rep. Ashley Hinson, or US Sens. Chuck Grassley or Joni Ernst?
All of them said they had not.
“Not at all, unfortunately,” Newman said.
When I asked him if that surprised him, Turek said it was “something that’s missing in modern politics.”
But he wants to be different.
“People are struggling, and they’re struggling enormously,” Turek said. “And so that’s what I wanna go up there to address.”
And he has some ideas on how to fix it.
“I think we can drive down costs immediately,” he said, pointing to “this unnecessary war in Iran” and “these chaotic tariffs” as the first things he would vote to end.
But there were larger structural issues facing small businesses he wanted to address as well. He told me he agreed with “more investment” like federal small business grants and tax abatements, noting the current structure favored “large multinational corporations like Amazon.”
I think we need to put more investment into these communities and, you know, some, some federal funds, whether that be grants, whether that be tax abatements, and honestly arrive at a more fair playing field.
“These large multinational corporations are just extractionary,” he said. “All the money they end up getting into the community, they just pull out.
“So we gotta do everything that we can to protect small brick and mortar locations,” he added.
