Business leaders launch new efforts to get capital to the local startups that need it most.

Manuel Lopez opened Lopez Automotive in Salinas in 1982. He’s been mostly self-reliant since then, but with the economy still sputtering, he needed $15,000 for new smog-testing machines. “[Bank of America] and Wells Fargo told me my loan was too small,” he says.

Lopez is one of 69 business owners in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties to receive a microloan from the Opportunity Fund, a San Jose-based nonprofit microlender, which has loaned $1.2 million to local businesses since launching its Monterey Bay arm a year ago.

The fund’s local outreach came about thanks to Bud Colligan, an investor and social entrepreneur, who helped launch and develop the MacIntosh personal computer in the ‘80s. Colligan now lives in Santa Cruz, and has both the street cred and the cash to encourage a new kind of economic development strategy: Instead of wooing big Silicon Valley tech firms to the region, he thinks the way to economic vitality is to diversify.

“We’re not going to build Google here,” he says. “Monterey has never recovered from Fort Ord closing. That should be a very strong lesson for all of us.”

It’s a lesson Colligan delivered June 24 to local business leaders at the annual “regional critical conversation,” one of dozens of statewide business forums, this one hosted by the Monterey County Business Council.

There, Guillermo Mazier of Denver-based Atlas Business Consulting unveiled the beta version of a new website Atlas developed for local members of the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership, formed in 2012. (Monterey County, PG&E, the Monterey airport and cities of Greenfield, Gonzales, Salinas, Marina, Sand City and Seaside each paid between $2,500 and $5,000 to join.)

The site lets prospective businesses search for real estate in multiple jurisdictions and even apply for permits. “We believe the platform we’re working on here is going to be a model across the country,” Mazier says.

Getting information out to businesses is one thing, but cash is another. That’s where Colligan comes in, with leadership on microloans and also a new venture capital panel of 20 prospective investors he helped launch in January.

Since then, Central Coast Angels has fielded 10 business pitches and bought into three Santa Cruz-based businesses: predictive policing software maker PredPol; PayStand, online payment processing; and NextSpace, a shared workspace environment with nine locations.