City’s DBE program strives to give ‘a leg up’
24th July 2017 · 0 Comments
By Michael Patrick Welch
Contributing Writer
Young African-American contractor Otis Tucker currently spends his days on Bourbon Street overseeing the completion of a Sewerage and Water Board contract his small business, Trucking Innovation, procured as part of the big transformations occurring in New Orleans’ party center.
“When I started trying to do this, I didn’t know the acronyms a contractor needs to know,” Tucker recalls. “I didn’t know the market prices, or how to fill out the bid documents. It was intimidating when you’ve got 200 pages in one bid document.”
Tucker thanks the City of New Orleans’ Disadvantage Business Enterprise (DBE) program, founded under Mayor Ray Nagin, for helping the 33-year-old Lower Ninth Ward resident “transition from the streets.”
“I was telling a banker friend what I wanted to do as a subcontractor, and he told me to go down to the city’s Office of Supplier Diversity,” says Tucker. “They told me about BuildNOLA, which was like going to contractor college. At the time I was just one truck, one man, but I saw opportunities to bid in the private sector, and BuildNOLA gave me the road map.”
The Office of Supplier Diversity oversees certification, compliance, outreach, training and capacity building for local, small and disadvantaged New Orleans businesses. Some 225 DBEs and local small businesses have graduated from its BuildNOLA training and capacity building program since 2015, claims the Landrieu administration’s new performance report (an update on 2015’s Creating Pathways to Prosperity for the People of New Orleans), which details DBE participation in New Orleans from the beginning of 2016 up to June 30, 2017.
The Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program, designed to help minority- and/or female-owned companies get government contracts, set out to guarantee at least 35 percent of city contracts go to city-registered DBE businesses, with an overall goal of awarding 50 percent of city contracts to locally owned businesses. The program wasn’t living up to its potential when Landrieu came into office in 2010.
In 2013, the administration refurbished the program by strengthening compliance rules and expanding the program’s outreach. Today, bidders must provide documentation to the city illustrating efforts to subcontract disadvantaged businesses, among other improvements. The new 2017 Creating Pathways performance report, declares that DBE participation has increased by 31 percent since 2010, up to 47.7 percent this current year.
In recent years, the program has made more of a point to monitor DBE participation in both construction and service projects.
“In 2015, we started tracking not just the public but the private,” says Ashleigh Gardere, an adviser to the mayor since 2010, who helps manage the city’s Office of Workforce Development and Office of Supplier Diversity. As a result, according to the report, out of $187,418, 764 in total contract awards this past year, $77, 580,190 went to DBE firms (with a little over $16 million having been paid out so far).
In terms of Otis Tucker’s company: “My BuildNOLA training lasted a few weeks, twice a week. Then my first job, right out of the gate six months after training, there was a contract tailored to my industry, a hauling contract with S&WB, and I knew how to respond because S&WB had been part of BuildNOLA, so I knew exactly how to respond to that contract. I’d learned their lingo.”
Within just the first year, he’d been a certified DBE, says Tucker. “We have gone from one truck, to 15 trucks, to now we’ve sometimes reached 35 trucks on the road. My revenues from last year have more than doubled.”
The new DBE report also details the ways in which the $1.5 million BuildNOLA Mobilization Fund Pilot Project have provided contract financing and loans for various DBE’s.
The report goes on to list almost 40 city agencies that have gotten on board with the city’s DBE program, including new partners the Sewerage and Water Board, the Department of Aviation, New Orleans Redevelopment Association, Housing Authority of New Orleans, New Orleans Business Alliance and the Industrial Development Board.
“Step by step, we are getting everyone on the same platform,” says Gardere.
“For people in this city kids and minorities, there are other programs and ways to get out of poverty,” recognizes Otis Tucker. “But for people who are just tired of school, this kind of industry- specific training helps, where they can pass on generational prosperity.”
The Office of Supplier Diversity will hold a public meeting August 30 from 3:30 to 5 p.m., then another from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at Southern University at New Orleans in the University Conference Center. Until then, find opportunities at https://www.nola.gov/economic-development/supplier-diversity/opportunities/.
This article originally published in the July 24, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
