CA State Treasurer Fiona Ma is Lending a Helping Hand to Small Businesses

by Akemi Tamanaha, Associate Editor

Small businesses in California continue to struggle during the COVID-19 pandemic. California State Treasurer Fiona Ma, who has long advocated for small businesses throughout her career, is working to give them a fighting chance. 

AsAmNews spoke to Treasurer Ma, 54, about her long career in politics despite her parents initial opposition and the work she is doing to support small businesses during the pandemic. 

Ma didn’t always have political aspirations. Her parents wanted her to be an accountant. She attended Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, which had a specific CPA (certified public accountant) track.

She spent five years at Ernst and Young in San Francisco working in their real estate tax group while simultaneously earning her masters in taxation from Golden Gate University in 1992. She quit when she was 28 to start her own practice.

After leaving her job at Ernst and Young, Ma slowly began to dip her toe into politics. She was appointed president of the Asian Business Association where she represented women and minority small business owners in public contracting as well as private contracting opportunities. 

“All of a sudden I was thrust into the world of politics and I started to understand that there are not a lot of women elected officials, people of color, Asian Americans like myself, and certainly not small business owners,” Ma said.

In 1995, she was appointed to the Assessment Appeals Board of San Francisco by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors where she heard property tax cases. That same year she also took a part-time job with Senator John Burton. Her parents did not want her to quit accounting, so she sat on the Assessment Appeals Board, worked for Senator Burton, served as president of the Asian Business Association and ran her own business all at the same time.

“It was kind of busy at the time,” Ma said. “I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do, but I knew I did not want to sit in an office and do tax returns for the rest of my life.”

Ma’s parents later decided to move to Las Vegas and gave her their blessing to run for office when they left. In 2002, she ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the Sunset District and won. 

At the time, she was the only Asian American woman on the board. She hired two Chinese American women to work in her office who both spoke Cantonese and Mandarin. She says people told her she was crazy for hiring two Asian American women.

“My justification was if I’m the only Asian on the board everyone’s going to be calling me for assistance, whether you’re Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese, Hmong,” Ma said. “And everybody did call my office because we did extensive outreach and they understood that I got elected because I wanted to serve my community.”

While on the Board of Supervisors, Ma passed legislation that limited human trafficking by requiring that massage palors, where the trafficking occurred, apply for a conditional use permit. She created legislation that banned toxic chemicals from baby products in San Francisco. She welcomed back tech companies to San Francisco by helping pass legislation that eliminated the payroll tax that had driven them away. 

After serving on the Board of Supervisors for four years, she ran for the State Assembly in California’s 19th District. She served as the 19th District Assemblywoman for 6 years under two different governors and three different speakers. She got 60 bills signed under different leadership, including a bill that banned toxic chemicals in baby products throughout the state.

In 2011, Ma married a firefighter-turned-politician named Jason Hodge. Throughout her career she has advocated for firefighters and policies that protect Californians from fires.

Ma was termed out in 2012 and sat out for two years before being elected to one of California’s two tax boards: the State Board of Equalization, where she used her tax background and private sector experience. She sat on the board for four years and ran for State Treasurer in 2018. She was sworn in on January 7, 2019 and has been on the job for about a year and a half.

As treasurer Ma’s takes in over 2 trillion in the state’s money every year. She helps manage bonds and keeps track of budget surpluses and deficits. 

Since the pandemic, Ma has been busy managing the state’s funds to support Californians, small businesses in particular. Ma says that throughout the pandemic California small businesses have struggled to stay afloat in a state where it is already difficult to run a small business.

One of the challenges for small businesses, Ma says comes in their lack of sophistication and resources when compared to larger corporations. Take the CARES Act for example. The legislation gave several large corporations hefty Paycheck Protection Program loans (PPP loans) and left small businesses in the lurch. 

The large corporations received backlash for taking that money, but Ma says the real problem is that many small businesses did not know how to apply for the money.

“[Large corporations] got a lot of backlash because they applied but that’s because they’re sophisticated,” Ma said. “They read the papers. They’re getting emails. They have lawyers who advise them.”

Ma says her office received hundreds of calls from small businesses trying to access the loan money. Many have been unable to access unemployment insurance because they’re independent contractors.

Ma and her staff, who she calls the Ma Squad, have been working hard to ensure small businesses get the information they need. She has participated in over 24 webinars about relief resources for different industries, but mostly small businesses. She and the Ma Squad have put together resource guides for small businesses that discuss tax relief and food relief.

Her office also has a dedicated email line [email protected], which takes hundreds of questions everyday. 

“A lot of agencies no one picks up, websites are crashing, offices are closed, so nobody is available to help them,” Ma said. “So we have essentially been one of the resource agency operators.”

Ma also manages state investments and bonds as part of her job as treasurer. She says her office has put money into local banks so that small businesses and local communities can access it. They have also continued to issue infrastructure bonds that will help keep people at work. 

In addition to aiding small businesses, Ma has also been working to ensure California continues to build affordable housing. Ma chairs two boards that deal with affordable housing and has expedited applications for building affordable housing in order to fund as many applications for affordable housing projects as possible. 

Ma is hopeful that small businesses may see a rise in business over the summer, but says its important that all small businesses follow public health mandates. 

“This coronavirus pandemic is not over,” Ma said. “There is no vaccine at this moment.”

Ma says she is also empathetic to the increased discrimination Asian Americans have seen throughout the pandemic. She said the labelling of coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” by President Trump and other prominent Republican leaders is not helping. 

“We need leadership from the top to spread the message that this is an illness that impacts all of us,” Ma said. “It is not discriminating against any race, age, or demographic. We’re all in this together.”

Ma also wants more Asian Americans to get involved in politics. In the last 20 years, Ma has also had over 1,000 interns, many Asian Americans, come through her offices. Her summer internship programs have taken in so many interns that they have often been likened to summer camps. Ma says she wants to encourage the next generation of Asian Americans to be civic-minded. 

Ma ran for office in districts that were heavily Asian American, but Asian American support was not always guaranteed. During her time in San Francisco, she said it was sometimes difficult to convince Asian Americans to vote and get involved. 

“My own family members wouldn’t vote for me sometimes unless I reminded them to,” Ma joked. 

Ma noted that Asian Americans would often come to community meetings or vote when they struggled to get their kids into high schools in their area. She says she saw Asian Americans get engaged when issues involved their children or their property. 

“I spent a long time trying to let the community know that you just can’t come out when there are issues that affect you personally,” Ma said. 

However, Ma also believes it’s important for politicians to engage Asian Americans in ways that are relatable to them. When she ran for office in San Francisco, she would carry an accordion folder filled with her bio in at least seven different languages. 

“As our communities mature I see that they are getting more aware,” Ma said. “They want to help. They want to participate. They certainly want their kids to be in a better place than they were.” 

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