Preliminary analysis prepared independently by House Strategies Group LLC from public data, ahead of the City of Frederick's forthcoming supplier diversity assessment and disparity study RFP (draft under review). Not affiliated with or endorsed by the City of Frederick. Every figure carries its source and its limits. Not a procurement-disparity finding.

Module · Utilization

Where the dollars went, and where the record stops

Utilization is the numerator: the share of public spending that reaches diverse firms. For Frederick, the public record supports exactly two readings: the City's 2021 study, which reconstructed FY2014-FY2018 dollars line by line, and the City's single published program review of 2022. This page shows both, and is explicit about what does not exist in public form. It does not fabricate a current series.

Prime dollars analyzed
$91,192,290
2021 study, FY2014-FY2018 relevant market
MWBE prime dollars
$22,887,373
25.09% of the total
Of MWBE prime dollars to one firm
96.6%
a single construction firm
Categories with zero prime MWBE dollars
2 of 5
Professional Services and Goods, all five years

The four numbers the public record supports

Three from the City's 2021 study; one from the City's first annual program review (2022). They are different measures and are not a time series.

25.1%
MWBE prime share
2021 study, FY14-FY18 prime dollars
27.0%
MWBE prime + sub
2021 study, including tracked subcontracts
96.6%
One firm's share of MWBE prime
A single Asian American-owned construction firm
20.0%
S/M/WBE spend, 2022
First program review; includes small non-MWBE firms

Source: The City's 2021 disparity study (Griffin & Strong, P.C.), FY2014-FY2018; City of Frederick first annual MWBE/SBR program review (2022). The 2022 figure counts small-, women-, and minority-owned firms combined.

The 2021 study's category grid: availability vs prime utilization

MWBE share of available firms (dollar-weighted) against MWBE share of prime dollars, FY2014-FY2018. Every category showed statistically significant underutilization.

Source: The City's 2021 disparity study, chapter tables and Appendix F Study Period rows.

The concentration finding
Headline MWBE utilization of 25.09 percent reads respectably until the composition is examined: 96.58 percent of all MWBE prime dollars went to one Asian American-owned construction firm, and the largest single non-minority vendor took 49.86 percent of construction dollars. African American, Hispanic, Native American, and women-owned firms received zero prime construction dollars in five years. Breadth of participation, not the headline rate, is the test the update must apply.
The two zero rows
Professional Services and Goods & Supplies recorded zero prime MWBE dollars across all five study years, against measured availability of 31.59 and 15.93 percent. A zero is a question, not a verdict: the update has to establish whether any award since 2021 moved either row, and if not, where in the process the exclusion operates. The public record cannot answer that today.
The honesty card: what the City does not publish
  • The Purchasing Policies amended in late 2021 require yearly effectiveness reviews of the SBR and MWBE programs; the 2022 review is the only one with public figures. No public FY2023-FY2025 annual reports or dashboard were found.
  • Award memos sit inside Granicus agenda packets, meeting by meeting, with no formal award-identifier field connecting them to payments.
  • The City spent roughly $275K on OpenGov procurement and budget software but publishes no utilization dashboard from it.
  • The 2021 study's data-reform recommendation (formal award identifiers, tracking awards under $50K, real NIGP codes, a relational subcontractor database) is the unfinished predicate for any current utilization series.
  • The update's five-FY study period will straddle the IonWave to OpenGov migration of January 1, 2026, a data-collection complication that has to be planned for, not discovered.

The update rebuilds utilization from City-controlled records: payment files, award memos, and subcontractor records, counting diverse firms whether certified or not. This portal does not fabricate a current utilization series from fragments, because no honest one can be built from public data alone.

The goals the City adopted after the study

Annual aspirational MWBE goals against the 2021 study's measured availability. The goals track availability, rounded to whole numbers.

Source: City of Frederick Purchasing Policies as amended late 2021 and current MWBE program materials; the City's 2021 disparity study availability estimates. The City set its aspirational goals at the 2021 study's measured availability levels, rounded to whole numbers. The report itself does not state the adopted goals; the match is an inference from the two documents, exact for all five categories.

Goal vs actual: the comparison that cannot be made yet

The City set category-specific MWBE goals. The only published performance figure is one combined number.

What the 2022 review reported
  • About 20 percent of procurement spend ($8.8M of $44M) reached small-, women-, and minority-owned firms combined.
  • 154 SBEs certified since January 2022; 400+ vendors classified, 223 self-identified S/M/WBE; 60 exemptions granted in 2022.
  • Police headquarters project: 40 percent MWBE design participation achieved; the 41 percent construction goal was still pending at the review.
Why that is not an answer
The goals are category-specific MWBE shares. The only published actual is a single combined figure that also counts small non-MWBE firms. The two cannot be compared directly, and that reporting gap is itself an assessment finding for Task 3.
See utilization against availabilityThe full 2021 baselineThe programs the review coversHow the update rebuilds utilization