SMALL BUSINESS : HEARD ON THE BEAT: Small Business : New L.A. Program Aids Women, Minority Contractors

The city of Los Angeles has launched a program to help minority- and women-owned businesses and other small ventures get a slice of increasingly inaccessible city mega-contracts.

LA OPS--Los Angeles Opportunities for Procurement and Services--was modeled after the city’s Minority Business Opportunity Committee (MBOC), which serves the public and private sectors. That federally funded program has touted its successes in finding minority contractors for projects such as the Staples Center and the Alameda Corridor.

Meanwhile, however, the minority contracting rate of the city itself was dismally low: A 1996 study, for example, showed that only 4% of contracts were going to minorities and women, compared with about 22% for the Alameda Corridor.

Those percentages shrank even further as city purchasing was lumped together with procurement by the airports, harbor and Department of Water and Power. That program, known as PRIMA 2000, was designed to trim bureaucratic fat from the procurement process, but nearly trimmed small ventures out of the public arena. LA OPS is an attempt to stem the damage.

PRIMA 2000 “could potentially have eliminated the lion’s share of small-business participation in a number of contracts, to put it very mildly,” said LA OPS Director Craig Keys, who has been on the job about a month.

“If you are accustomed to doing business on the order of $100,000 and now there’s a contract for $25 million, you may not have the capacity to even bid on it, especially if the contract is crafted in such a way that it’s all or nothing,” he said.

LA OPS was funded in July with $250,000 from the city General Services Department and the three so-called proprietary agencies. It will draw on MBOC’s existing database of certified minority-owned firms, which that entity passes on to prime contractors eager to diversify their supplier base.

In addition, LA OPS will create its own database, adding local vendors and suppliers to MBOC’s list, which is dominated by construction and professional service firms, MBOC Executive Director Diane Castano Sallee said.

It also will hold pre-bidding events to help subcontractors form teams that will allow them to bid on larger contracts. Furthermore, LA OPS will do outreach to big prime contractors to ensure they are making subcontracting opportunities available.

The program does not mandate subcontracting with small, minority or women-owned firms. However, it will set percentage goals for each mega-contract, depending on the industry, Sallee said.

LA OPS launched its efforts this summer on a seven-year, $25-million janitorial contract to be awarded next month.

For information or to be included in the LA OPS database, call (213) 847-0850.