The City of Tulsa is considering giving local companies a leg up when it comes to providing goods and services to the city.
City Senior Policy Advisor for Small Business, Entrepreneurship and Economic Innovation Clay Holk gave a presentation on local preference policies to the city's Economic Development Commission last week. He pointed to Chicago as a good example of how the city could essentially apply discounts to bids from companies headquartered in Tulsa.
"The city put forth sort of a tiered local bid preference system. So, it was 4% for a business which was based in Chicago, 6% if majority of the employees were located within Chicago and then 8% if the employees lived within high-poverty Census tracts," Holk said.
Holk said with Tulsa companies pulling in about 44% of city business in 2019, a local preference could give the city’s economy a boost.
Economic Development Commission member Shelley Cadamy had a request for the City of Tulsa's policy.
"Can we consider giving preference to local companies who also hire people with justice-involved backgrounds? I think that’s something that Tulsa could really, really jump ahead on," Cadamy said.
Cadamy said that would build upon Tulsa’s 2016 move to “ban the box” on initial employment applications, which removed the yes-no question about an applicant’s criminal history.
But commission member Warren Ross is staunchly opposed to a local preference.
"We may have all good intentions, but when we give this to a bureaucrat and it becomes a process, it’s going to run crazy, and it’s going to increase the cost to the city, and we don’t have the luxury of revenue in the City of Tulsa to be indulging these things," Ross said.
The local preference would apply only in situations where a Tulsa company could reasonably fulfill an order. Holk said it probably wouldn't cover situations where the city needed 500 computers, for example.
