Recognizing that small businesses drive job creation and economic growth, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) announced Thursday, a number of strategies aimed at better supporting their development.
According to a news release from FDOT, the following steps will be taken to help grow small businesses:
· Increase the percentage of small business reserved professional services contracts from 10% to 15% (the 10% goal for construction and maintenance contracts will remain the same);
· Increase the small business reserved project amount threshold from $1 million maximum value to $1.5 million maximum;
· Increase the threshold for requiring an overhead audit on professional services contracts from $250,000 to $500,000, which reduces the cost of doing business with the department;
· Incentivize larger firms to team with Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) and small businesses in types of services where they have been traditionally under-utilized;
· Simplify the small business size standard for construction/maintenance to one size threshold of $15 million instead of multiple thresholds based on the type of work (the professional services size standard was previously simplified to one threshold of $6.5 million);
· Expand the Small Business database that currently has professional services firms to include construction, maintenance and other contractual services firms.
The DBE program is designed for minority or female owned small businesses and according to FDOT over the last two years, the department has awarded directly or indirectly approximately $800 million or 11.40% of the total contracting dollars to DBEs.
FDOT also claimed that, since the inception of its Business Development Initiative (BDI), the department has reserved 260 contracts totaling $86 million and “this number is expected to increase significantly over the next year.”
