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.
Seattle is the recipient of a $1 million Bloomberg Procurement Transformation Grant, a partnership between the Department of Finance and Administrative Services, the Mayor’s Innovation and Performance Team, and the Harvard Government Performance Lab. As part of our goal of elevating procurement as a strategic function of City government, the City is highlighting a multi-part series of stories that demonstrate Citywide promising practices that can better support our WMBEs and this month’s feature highlights SPU’s work.
Over an hour-long conversation, Bocanegra and his brother explained their dilemma — they had experience, eagerness and a strong work ethic, but no connections. With an encyclopedic knowledge of City vendors and their needs, Martin-Arnold is the consummate matchmaker. She knew that FORMA, a large construction company with a portfolio of public and private projects throughout Western Washington, could use additional concrete cutters.
Within a month, FORMA hired Alonso’s Pro Concrete Cutting & Construction as a subcontractor to trench, cut and replace concrete panels for Seattle City Light as part of a project to repair damaged underground cables in Magnolia. It was the company’s biggest contract yet.
By August, Bocanegra, his brother, and their five employees were hard at work. They passed with flying colors, finishing the $330,000 job in one month instead of the budgeted two. They’ve since put in bids for two new jobs, one with SPU and another with Seattle Parks & Recreation.
While Bocanegra’s business is now off to the races, part of Martin-Arnold’s effective personal touch is follow-up. She checked in with Bocanegra after his team began the Magnolia job to make sure they had managed the sometimes cumbersome government paperwork.
“That’s the value add of meeting in person,” she said. “You can walk people through things and talk about the difficulties they’re having versus just giving them a list of things to do.”
Since she began her weekly Tabor 100 office hours in April 2023, Martin-Arnold has met with construction businesses, architecture firms, companies offering janitorial services and even a nurse who provides CPR training. Upwards of 10 people a day might take a seat at her lobby table. Over the course of this year, her name has been passed around in the minority contracting community, and increasingly business owners come to her because of a referral from an enthusiastic former customer.
“She really helped us,” said Bocanegra. “We have the potential to run big jobs. My guys are hungry to get better and to be busier. My responsibility is to keep them busy. If they are busy, they’re supporting their family. Now the whole weight falls on me.”
About Tabor Office Hours
Any City of Seattle colleague is welcome to conduct outreach and office hours at Tabor 100. Colleagues at FAS have drop-in office hours onsite and can be reached by email by any WMBE vendors.