Miguel Alonso Bocanegra has seen firsthand how a City of Seattle contract can transform a small business. Over a decade ago, he started out on a work crew to soft cut and pour concrete. At the time, his employer had one truck. Once the company landed City contracts, their capacity expanded to a staff of 20 with nine trucks. The rapid growth trajectory inspired Bocanegra.
“That’s what motivated me to go bigger and better, not just stay in one place,” he said.
Originally from Aguascalientes, Mexico, Bocanegra has lived in Washington state for nearly 20 years. “Nobody in my family owns a business,” he said. But after seeing how City contracts helped his former employer prosper, he and his brother decided to strike out on their own in 2021 and started Alonso’s Pro Concrete Cutting & Construction from their home base in Bonney Lake.
The problem was how to land big projects. The scrappy start-up’s first contracts were nickel and dime jobs. He knew from on-the-job experience that the City of Seattle has a reliable need for skilled concrete cutting and pouring on large-scale infrastructure projects. But who to call? He did some online research and never could determine the best way to interface with the city’s massive bureaucracy.
This was until he stumbled upon Tabor 100. Tabor 100 is a nonprofit whose mission is to grow economic opportunities for minority contractors. It was founded in 1999 in honor of Langston Tabor, a Seattle electrician and vocal advocate for minority contractors as a way to give an economic leg-up to disadvantaged groups.
In 2020, the Tabor 100 Economic Development Hub opened in Tukwila. With a mixture of private offices, training rooms, meeting spaces, and deskspace, the building offers a one-stop shop for public sector agencies to connect with minority contractors. That’s where Bocanegra and his brother showed up on a Wednesday in June 2023. In the light-filled lobby, they found Edwina Martin-Arnold, Inclusion Advisor in the Department of Finance and Administrative Services, holding court for her weekly office hours.
“I sit in the lobby at a long table and talk to just about every business that comes through,” she said.
Edwina-Martin’s presence at Tabor is part of a larger Citywide effort to make contracting more equitable. [Read more…]