Nationally, fewer small businesses have secured loans through the U.S. Small Business Administration over the past year than the previous one.

But in the north country, small businesses were only slightly off the pace of the previous year in terms of the number of loans.

"What we've seen in upstate New York is that the subprime debacle has not really impacted us the way it did in other areas," SBA Syracuse District Director Bernard J. Paprocki said. "Lenders are telling me that they're taking a closer look at riskier small businesses, but they still have money to loan."

The SBA offers two widely used loan programs for startup and expansion of small businesses across the country. During the 2007 fiscal year, which ran October 2006 through September 2007, the agency secured nearly 100,000 loans for small businesses. But in the 2008 fiscal year, that number dropped by nearly 30 percent. The total value of the loans also dropped, from $20.6 billion in 2007 to $17.96 billion in 2008.

Mr. Paprocki said a confluence of many factors led to fewer loans. Those include the tightening credit market, small business owners waiting to incur more debt or to see how low interest rates would fall, the uncertain stock market, the national election and the cost of fuel.

"While fuel is now $2.50 or $2.40, it wasn't too long ago when it was above $4," he said. "We tend to forget quickly what the impact of that situation was."

In Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence counties, SBA guaranteed 42 loans from October 2007 through September, according to SBA data. In the previous year, SBA secured 45 loans for small businesses in the region.

But the biggest difference was in the loan amounts. In the 2007 fiscal year, the loans totaled $8,723,118. But the loan amounts dropped by 53.4 percent, to $4,061,200, in fiscal 2008.

Mr. Paprocki said not to read too much into the small sample size of the north country, especially in the size of loans.

"It just depends on what kind of year it was," he said. "Barring any major future catastrophic situation in the economy, we've fared much better here than in a lot of areas in the country."

The SBA's district, based in Syracuse, approved 804 loans totaling $127,344,078. This represents a 16 percent decline in the 34-county region in the number of loans from the 2007 fiscal year.

Mr. Paprocki said lenders in upstate New York have been much more prudent in their lending practices than lenders in other areas.

"Two-thirds of our banks did as much or more lending," he said. "Larger lenders did fall off."

Instead of focusing on the number of loans, Mr. Paprocki said, the focus has shifted to the impact of loans, such as the number of employees the loan has enabled a small business to hire.

"I don't know of any credit-worthy small business that isn't getting a loan," he said.