City and County of San Francisco
Chapter 14B Local Business Enterprise Ordinance Community Outreach

The goal of the Chapter 14B Local Business Enterprise Ordinance (LBE) is to maximize opportunities for local small businesses to compete for city contracts and prohibit discrimination in the award and administration of city contracts. Chapter 14B achieves these goals by implementing established policies such as discounting the bid and rating of small local businesses on public contracts, setting contracting goals, and setting aside certain public contracts for micro local businesses.

With the recent transfer of the 14B program from the Human Rights Commission (HRC) to the Contract Monitoring Division (CMD), the City Administrator had a unique opportunity to update the legislation during the transition to formalize the current management by the CMD and oversight by the City Administrator’s Office, document the current economic climate, and to implement any specific changes reflecting the current business conditions in the City and County of San Francisco. This kind of opportunity to update the legislation has only occurred twice before in the 50-year history of the program.

In order to help inform the state of current business conditions in the City, and gather input from the small business community about the 14B program, I worked with the City and County of San Francisco to engage the small business community to gather feedback related to the legislative and administrative aspects of the Chapter 14B LBE program.

Key components of this outreach included workshops and surveys in order to identify common benefits and challenges associated with the LBE program. The results of this work will be combined into a summary of community feedback. The goal is to use this information to help inform improvements to legislative and administrative aspects of the Contract Monitoring Division (CMD), and specifically to enhance the Chapter 14B LBE program.

(This work was executed as the Senior Communications Manager at D&A Communications)