We are DC's small business owners, and we are writing with one ask.

In your first 100 days, give one cabinet-level official the job and the authority to shepherd small businesses through the city's system. Call the role what you'd like — a Small Business Ombudsman, a Small Business Czar, a Chief Small Business Officer.

What matters is accountability. Today, no one in DC government has the authority to make the city's systems work for small businesses, and no one is held accountable when they don't.

Right now:

• A child care center stood fully built, with rent due every month, for nearly six months because the city could not schedule one fire inspection, while parents who needed those spots were turned away the entire time.


• A restaurant owner paid rent for seven and a half months on a space they were not even allowed to start renovating, waiting on a single permit before a hammer could swing.


• A homegrown tech company shut down its DC operations after more than a year of waiting to get approved here, then stood the same operation up in Pennsylvania in a matter of weeks.


• A bar was staffed and ready to open when the city's own licensing office gave it the wrong paperwork, and the two-week delay meant rent, payroll, and bills all going out while not a dollar came in.

We can offer many more stories like these, but we would rather stop fighting the system and start helping you build a city where a new business moves through the agencies at a pace it can plan around, hiring DC residents and paying DC taxes.

The District already has an agency meant to help small businesses, but by law it cannot compel the permitting, licensing, and inspection agencies to move. This agency is also not held accountable for whether small businesses actually open or stay open. You can fill this gap in accountability with an executive order in your first 100 days covering the agencies you control. Austin (TX), New York City (NY), Maryland, and the federal government have all established small business offices or ombudsmen to do this.

The stakes reach well beyond any one storefront. Small businesses are 98 percent of all businesses in the District and employ 259,181 people, nearly half of the private-sector workforce. As the federal government sheds jobs, with the city's Chief Financial Officer projecting a roughly 20 percent decline in federal payrolls by 2029, small business is the part of the economy that has to carry DC through what comes next. Right now, we are doing it in waiting rooms, on hold for inspections and paying rent on empty rooms while the clock runs.

We want to help you get this done, and if small businesses are thriving by the end of your term, that is a legacy worth claiming.