The Almond Administration has expanded, reconfigured and found a new home for the Minority Business Enterprise Office in hopes of helping minority and women-owned businesses better compete for state contracts.
The commission overseeing the MBE office now will have nine members instead of eight. It will also include a general contractor in addition to an appointee from the Black Contractors Association; a representative from the Hispanic Commission; and a member of the financial services community, according to Lisa Pelosi, Almond’s acting director of communications.
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Commission members act as consultants to MBE member businesses — or those small businesses at least 51-percent owned and operated by a person from a minority group or a woman. Having a general contractor and a financial services professional on the board should help member businesses when it comes to issues like bonding, or contractors’ insurance, said Charles Newton, director of the MBE office and a member of an advisory committee tracking minority hiring for the Providence Place project.
Representation from the Hispanic Commission also is an obvious choice, as Hispanics are the fastest growing minority in the state, he said.
The difficulty for start-up businesses in getting bonded is perhaps one of several factors contributing to the aforementioned committee’s finding last month that the mall’s developers are falling woefully short of goals for hiring minority and women contractors and construction firms, Newton said. The size of contracts, access to materials and pricing are other possibilities, he said.
Almond signed the executive order expanding the MBE Commission within 48 hours of the committee’s making public its report. However, Pelosi and Newton said the timing was coincidental.
The action had its roots in a January study of the Minority Business Enterprise Statute by the Almond administration and the Attorney General’s office in light of legal challenges and Supreme Court decisions, Pelosi said. The General Assembly passed the Minority Business Enterprise law in 1986, setting a yet-to-be-met goal of awarding minority- and women-owned businesses 10 percent of all state contracts. The recent expansion of the commission and an outreach program to the state’s more than 2,000 minority- and women-owned businesses resulted, Pelosi said. So did a bill that would have raised from $5,000 to $50,000 the threshold at which companies seeking state contracts would have to obtain performance bonds.
However, the General Assembly did not approve the proposed legislation.
“I think it’s easy to say” the executive order was a reaction to the mall report, Newton said.
“But I think we’re really just trying to be proactive in moving forward.”
Meanwhile, the program’s staff of three housed in the state Department of Administration at One Capital Hill will move to One West Exchange Street next month. That’s where the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation has its offices in the Westin Hotel.
The DOA will continue to oversee the MBE office, Pelosi said, adding that the move is “more philosophical” and practical.
“We’re trying to encourage more minority- and women-owned businesses by physically putting them in a building where our EDC is solely devoted to improving the economy in Rhode Island,” Pelosi said.
Newton agreed.
“It might be good for us to work in concert,” Newton said. “I think the feeling is that a lot of (MBE and EDC) programs dovetail.”
