This story first ran in GBH News’ politics newsletter.
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If you have a bright idea for how to set up and run a bunch of curbside electric vehicle charging stations, the city of Boston wants to hear from you.
At the end of June, Boston issued two requests seeking ideas from contractors about how to build a charging network — one for a system that would be owned and operated by the city, the other run by a private company. The city is pretty clear that they don’t know what this would look like. One of the bid documents says Boston’s looking for a partner who “will help discover a model of deploying curbside chargers that can be brought to scale citywide.” The goal is to install a minimum of 60 curbside charging stations.
Shonté Davidson is the president of a partnership of minority- and women-owned businesses called the Better Together Brain Trust that is trying to break into the EV installation field. She says Boston’s plug-in ambitions are “a great opportunity” but there are still a bunch of barriers — not the least of which is “the business model isn’t there because there isn’t enough demand” to generate revenue for whoever owns the charging stations.
But Boston is also in a hurry: The bids say the city wants the charging stations up and running within six months of signing a contract.
Like other governments and agencies across the state of Massachusetts, Boston has not had a strong record of signing contracts with minority-owned businesses. With billions of federal dollars flowing into green infrastructure through legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act over the next few years, there has been a push by the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts to expand minority participation — in particular in the EV industry.
BECMA chief Nicole Obi said the group is focusing on assembling “pods” of small businesses that can work together to win an EV installation and service contract, since very few individual companies have all the skills and certifications required for the whole project. BECMA has held workshops for about 100 small businesses to get them engaged in the EV marketplace.
Boston clearly sees an opportunity to bring in diverse businesses in the green energy economy. Green New Deal Director Oliver Sellers-Garcia told GBH News that while he can’t comment on any specific procurement, “small and minority owned businesses are really a growth sector in the whole business of decarbonization. ... I think there is definitely an opportunity, whether it's this [project] or in the future, for businesses to grow into this space.”
Since 2020, the Color of Public Money series from GBH News’ investigative team has documented the failure of Massachusetts government entities to buy goods and services from minority-owned businesses. We proved the value of contracts won by minority businesses had dropped over two decades.
Partly in response to our stories, the state has put more focus on diverse spending, and the value of contracts won by minority-owned firms jumped last year. Just last week, the Healey administration set goals for the first time in spending money with LGBTQ-owned and disability-owned businesses.
As the state works on spending more with Black and brown businesses, going green may create an opportunity to do better.
