The City of Albuquerque spends around $400 million a year on purchasing goods and services. About 65 percent of that already goes to local businesses in Albuquerque, including Diverse Office Supply, a partnership of two woman-owned Albuquerque businesses — one a manufacturer of office supplies, where 60 percent of its employees are adults with special needs, and the other a distributor. Albuquerque’s city code already had local and small business preferences in city purchasing for contracts that require a public bidding process. It defines “local” as having a headquarters and principal office in Albuquerque or the surrounding Bernalillo County, and “small” as having fewer than 50 employees. The process targets smaller purchases for local small business vendors that has the additional knock-on effect of tilting the playing field ever-so-slightly in favor of businesses owned by women and people of color.

The City of Albuquerque spends around $400 million a year on purchasing goods and services — excluding any CARES Act spending. About 65 percent of that already goes to local businesses in Albuquerque, including Diverse Office Supply, a partnership of two woman-owned Albuquerque businesses — one a manufacturer of office supplies, where 60 percent of its employees are adults with special needs, and the other a distributor. The partnership took on a $5 million-a-year contract with the city in 2019 that was previously held by a Florida-based supplier.

Selecting a group of qualified and competent bidders will thus allow the city to be more agile in awarding professional service contracts by mutual agreement. In this way, boroughs and city departments as well as the Sociétés de développement commercial will be able to call on pre-qualified teams to design and implement measures that address their issues, such as modified routes and user mobility, safe boarding and disembarking of public transit users, waiting lines for businesses, outdoor sales and consumption areas, functional and technical pickup and delivery spaces, rest areas and street furniture (e.g., washrooms, benches, no-contact garbage receptacles). Given the experimental nature of the temporary development projects both currently underway and to come, it is important to make good use of a range or high-performance solutions that can be deployed throughout the city

Proposals can address issues pertaining to supply, administrative support, people management, sales systems or other areas. The implemented solutions will help small businesses deal with the challenges from COVID-19.