NEWS RELEASE: New Online Dashboard Shows Diversity of High-Speed Rail Small Businesses Program

Feb 2 2021 | Sacramento

The California High-Speed Rail Authority (Authority) has launched a new online dashboard that tracks Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBE), which include women- and minority-owned small businesses participating on the high-speed rail project. The feature is on the Authority’s small business program homepage at https://hsr.ca.gov/small_business/.

“We designed the new dashboard to highlight minority-owned small businesses’ participation in building high-speed rail and to transparently display the contracting dollars awarded,” said Catrina Blair, the Authority’s Chief of Process and Program Delivery. “The small-business community, prime contractors and the public can now see the progress we’re making on our aggressive small-business goals.”

In addition to program goals and small-business participation displays, the dashboard also features an array of new user-friendly visual and graphical data, including breakdowns of minority-owned small businesses working on the high-speed rail program and total dollars expended to date. The Authority will regularly update the dashboard to reflect the latest publicly available information.

As of November 30, 2020, there were 574 small businesses working on the high-speed rail program, including 62 Disabled Veteran Business Enterprises and 185 DBEs. That includes 53 Hispanic-owned firms, 27 Black-owned businesses, 16 Asian Pacific-owned firms, 27 Asian Subcontinent-owned companies, and 10 companies owned by Native Americans.

The Authority’s aggressive 30% participation goal for small businesses includes a 10% participation goal for DBE. Business owners interested in partnering with the Authority can find information on small-business certification, contracting opportunities and vendor registration by visiting https://hsr.ca.gov/small_business/get_connected.aspx.

The high-speed rail project is currently under construction on 119 miles in the Central Valley, with more than 5,000 construction workers dispatched since the start of construction. For a closer look at the progress of the project visit www.buildhsr.com.

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