D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is pitching a new round of reforms to the city’s much-maligned local contracting program, aiming to close several loopholes in a law designed to drive more work to locally based companies.
Specifically, Bowser will try and bar large businesses based outside the city from gaming the system by establishing a token subsidiary in the District. Similarly, the bill introduced Tuesday aims to prevent companies based outside D.C. from forming joint ventures with local firms solely to gain an upper hand in winning city contracts.
Those provisions would address two of the most persistent complaints about the District’s Certified Business Enterprise system, a program that can trace its roots back to the late former Mayor Marion Barry’s efforts to help more Black-owned businesses enter the city contracting and construction business. Most of the mayors to succeed Barry have tried to reform a program that many believe too often benefits politically connected companies and other large firms that understand how to work the system, as opposed to its original mission of bringing more diverse business owners to the table.
