First lady Jill Biden addresses small business aid, Latino concerns in KCK visit

First lady Jill Biden traveled to Kansas City, Kan., on Tuesday to promote the Biden administration's aid to small businesses during the pandemic while listening to the concerns of the Latino community.

Biden held a discussion called a charla — Spanish for "chat" — during the final week of National Hispanic Heritage Month. It was one of three charlas the first lady is holding this week, along with events in Chicago and Allentown, Pa.

"I think a lot of times people don't have a really positive image of the government and what the government does, so I think it's important we get out the message," Biden said, adding that "I hope that people of Kansas see that government can be good and can do good things and does help people."

Biden was joined by four participants, including a University of Kansas aerospace engineering student, a CEO, the director of the Hispanic Economic Development Corporation and a poet. They shared personal stories of achievement in the face of adversity.

Olivia Salazar Caudillo, a KU junior from Kansas City, Kan., described how she is the only Latina in her engineering class. She was intent on pursuing an education, saying her grandparents dropped out before graduating high school.

"The first day I felt scared, I felt out of place and underrepresented ... But then I thought about my grandparents and my family and all of the other Latinos and women in general that probably wanted to be an engineer and I wanted to keep doing that for them," she said.

Biden was also joined by Rep. Sharice Davids, Kansas's only Democrat in Congress, Gov. Laura Kelly and Isabella Casillas Guzman, administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA), as well as Kansas City, Mo., Mayor Quinton Lucas, among other politicians. The officials appeared at El Centro Academy, a bilingual pre-K school that Davids has previously highlighted as benefiting from federal COVID-19 relief programs.

Davids, who sits on the House Small Business Committee, said that while she works to bring voices from her district to Washington, it's not every day that gets "to bring folks home to hear from those voices themselves and see the Kansas City region's entrepreneurial spirit first-hand."

El Centro received $317,600 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans that were forgiven, according to a database maintained by ProPublica. In one measure of the pandemic's impact, roughly 128,000 PPP loans were made to Kansas businesses. The vast majority were $150,000 or less.

Not all businesses had resources to devote to obtaining PPP loans or relationships with bankers who could help them. KCK Chamber President and CEO Daniel Silva said his organization has done what it can to connect businesses to aid, which has been the difference for some operations between staying open and closing or scaling back.

"It's about access to capital, access to resources, access to information as it comes out," Silva said in an interview.

Biden and Guzman touted the COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, a disaster relief loan aimed at helping struggling small businesses. SBA has made changes to the program this year designed to increase its availability and effectiveness, including raising the cap on loans to $2 million and offering businesses up to 24 months of payment deferment. About $2.6 million in EIDL loans have been made in Kansas.

Prior to the charla, Biden appeared with Ari Rodriguez Boog, the founder of Archifootprint, a Latina-owned architecture firm in Lenexa that has a sustainability focus. The firm has received several rounds of relief aid through the SBA.

"I don't think we would be here otherwise," Rodriguez Boog said.

Biden's visit was her second to the Kansas City area as first lady. In May, she toured a vaccination clinic at Metropolitan Community College.

Tuesday's trip came amid lingering concerns among Democrats over Hispanic and Latino support for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Research released this spring by EquisLabs, which is focused on increased Latinx political participation, found that while Latinos were a critical part of the coalition that elected Biden and other Democrats, Trump and Republicans "made gains that cut across geography & place of origin."

"The Democratic Party needs to understand that the Hispanic community is not monolithic, that you would be very wise to pay attention to the very differing needs of different Latinx communities across the country as we go into 2022," said Brad Bauman, a Democratic strategist and partner at Fireside Campaigns.

"One thing that we know based on what we saw in 2020 is that the ways in which we are communicating and delivering for Latinx communities is not necessarily working," Bauman said, "and we need to be listening more and we need to be doing more."

Kansas's 3rd congressional district, where the first lady's visit took place, includes some of the state's most racially and ethnically diverse areas. In the 2020 Census, 13% of residents statewide identified as Hispanic or Latino, compared to 33% in Wyandotte County. A decade ago, just over 26% of Wyandotte County residents said they were Hispanic or Latino.

Still, Wyandotte County voter turnout has lagged behind the rest of Kansas. In November 2020, just under 63% of registered voters in the county cast a ballot, while nearly 71% of all Kansas voters did.

Biden's visit to the county gave Democrats — at least for the day — a bigger megaphone to talk about what the party has delivered for the district ahead of what may be a challenging reelection campaign for Davids. The Republican-controlled state Legislature will redraw Kansas's congressional maps next spring, creating uncertainty over the future of the 3rd district.

The district, which includes all of Wyandotte and Johnson counties and a portion of Miami County, has too many people and must shrink, according to the latest Census figures. That has ignited fears among Democrats that Republicans may try to either split Wyandotte into multiple districts or move the county into the 1st, a sprawling, mostly rural district that encompasses western and north central Kansas.

Their fears aren't unfounded. A decade ago, top Republicans did pursue a plan to move the county into the 1st district before abandoning it. And former Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican, predicted last year her party could redraw boundary lines to allow her party to hold all four of the state's congressional districts.

The Biden administration is trying to avoid the losses that the president's party traditionally suffers in midterm elections, said Chris Reeves, a Democratic strategist in Kansas. "I think the Biden administration is concerned about the way Republicans will draw this district," Reeves said.

For their part, Republicans predicted Biden's falling job approval will hurt Davids politically.

"Voters will hold Sharice Davids accountable next November for supporting Joe Biden's destructive policies," Kansas Republican Party executive director Shannon Golden said in a statement.

A September Gallup poll placed Biden's job approval at 43%, the lowest of his presidency. The number is down from a high of 57% in April. Some supporters of the president worry Biden hasn't received enough attention and credit for his accomplishments so far, specifically a nearly $2 trillion COVID-19 relief package earlier this year.

Democrats are hoping Congress will pass Biden's signature domestic policy agenda, called "Build Back Better," along with a bipartisan infrastructure spending bill that together will lift the president's approval and provide vulnerable Democrats a more solid foundation of accomplishment to run on next year.

Davids has been vocal in calling for the passage of the infrastructure bill, which the White House has said would provide Kansas with upwards of $3.2 billion to upgrade highways, bridges, broadband coverage and public transit.

The bill passed the Senate but has been held up in the House as moderate Democrats and liberal Democrats negotiate a compromise on a domestic spending package expected to contain spending on education, allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and include funding to combat climate change.

"When it comes to the transportation and infrastructure investments that are happening I think the administration has heard my message loud and clear," Davids said at an infrastructure-focused event last week. "We have got to make sure that our area has some serious investments because it's going to be good for the entire country. And I've appreciated the recognition of that by the administration." The Star's Katie Bernard contributed reporting."