Welsbach Electric and Hellman Electric together take $883M of the $1.32B in NYC streetlight and traffic-signal contracts on record. The other 1,883 NYC-licensed electricians compete for the remainder — or more often, get nothing at all.
NYC PPB Rule 3-08 lets any agency buy directly from a certified M/WBE vendor for up to $1.5M per purchase — no competitive solicitation required. For a $5,000 streetlight repair, the rule applies trivially.
We identified 101 NYC-licensed electricians who are eligible under this rule — minority- and women-owned, PASSPort-enrolled, active license, NAICS-matched. Across all five boroughs. The city is using almost none of them.
Submit a streetlight complaint. Our tool ranks the 101 direct-purchase-eligible electricians across eight weighted components — proximity, license tenure, owner-demographic equity, recent workload, and four more — then surfaces the top five for your address with full score transparency.
Same complaint. Same 2019 rule. A vendor pool the city already had — but wasn't using.
PPB Rule 3-08 doesn't tell agencies which M/WBE vendor to pick — it just tells them the conditions under which they can pick one directly. Our matrix scores eight signals that, together, answer the rule's implicit "responsibility determination" question with full transparency. Every weight maps to a specific clause of the rule or to the policy intent the rule serves.
Inverse — fewer recent dispatches from our platform earns higher. 60-day half-life decay.
Rule alignment: 3-08's intent is to expand who receives city work. Cycling through eligible vendors instead of repeatedly defaulting to the same one is the practical implementation of that intent.
Inverse, modulated by tenure. Vendors with the license and the track record but no city contracts score highest.
Rule alignment: 3-08 exists precisely to reach vendors outside the standard rotation. This component is the rule's intent encoded directly as a scoring signal.
Binary. Active M/WBE certification + PASSPort enrollment + active license + NAICS match + cert not expired.
Rule alignment: This IS the rule's literal four-part eligibility test. A vendor that fails any condition cannot legally receive a direct-purchase dispatch.
Stackable. MBE +6 · WBE +6 · LBE/EBE +2 · ethnicity +2. Cap at 15.
Rule alignment: 3-08 is the M/WBE-specific small-purchase rule — designed by name for the certifications this component rewards. Stacking favors intersectional ownership.
Quadratic decay. 0 mi = full points · 5 mi ≈ 4 pts · 10 mi ≈ 1 pt.
Rule alignment: 3-08 requires the contracting officer to verify vendor capacity to perform. For physical repair work, response distance is a direct capacity signal — closer vendors are more likely to actually complete the work on schedule.
Positive. Active license, no recent contract terminations or amendments. Each termination subtracts 2 pts.
Rule alignment: 3-08's responsibility determination requires the contracting officer to verify the vendor is in good standing. This component captures the license-status check the rule mandates.
Binary floor. Active license AND (any past city contract OR M/WBE directory entry). Pure floor — not a kingmaker.
Rule alignment: 3-08 requires the purchase to match the vendor's NIGP/NAICS code. This floor confirms the vendor has at least one external signal of capability beyond the license itself.
Inverse. Vendors with low recent contract dollar volume have room to take work without saturation.
Rule alignment: 3-08's responsibility test implicitly requires assessing whether the vendor can actually absorb the work. Empty recent workload = clear headroom.
Components 3, 4, and 6 are required by the literal text of PPB Rule 3-08. Components 1, 2, 5, 7, and 8 operationalize the rule's responsibility-determination and equity-expansion intent. Every dispatch through this tool comes with a complete per-component breakdown the agency can include in its dispatch record.
Enter any NYC address with a broken streetlight. The tool ranks the 101 direct-purchase-eligible electricians against your complaint location and surfaces the top five — each with the full score breakdown so you can see exactly why they were picked. If fewer than five eligible vendors sit within 10 miles, the matrix gracefully expands to the next tier and tells you it did.
Sixty seconds. Address, type, photos. We'll classify, dispatch, and draft the work order.
Hover any vendor pin to see the driving route to your complaint. Click Select on the vendor you want.
Ranked across the 8-component equity-first matrix. Each card shows the vendor's score, credibility signals, owner-demographic badges, and why the matrix surfaced them. Click Why this vendor? on any card to see the per-component breakdown.
Pick a vendor above and we'll auto-generate the M/WBE Noncompetitive Small Purchase Authorization memo per PPB Rule 3-08(c)(1)(iv) — the one-page document the agency files to authorize a direct-purchase dispatch under the 2019 rule.
Once you select a vendor on the map, the Download memo button on the right activates. The PDF generates client-side and downloads instantly with all vendor fields pre-populated.
Every dispatch through this tool routes work that would otherwise have gone to Welsbach or Hellman to a small minority- or women-owned electrician within 10 miles of the complaint. The numbers below show the immediate impact of your complaint, and the citywide impact if the matrix were used at scale.
From NYC OpenData "Recent Contract Awards" (qyyg-4tf5), filtered to DOT, DDC, and 6 other agencies × electrical-trade keywords (2003-2026).
1,883 of 1,894 NYC-licensed electricians (99.4%) hold zero direct DOT/DDC/DCAS streetlight or electrical contracts.
101 NYC electricians are direct-purchase-eligible under PPB Rule 3-08: M/WBE-certified, PASSPort-enrolled, NAICS-matched, active license.
Distributed across every borough — 29 Queens, 28 Brooklyn, 18 Bronx, 13 Manhattan, 13 Staten Island.
New York City has spent seven years with a procurement rule that lets agencies route up to $1.5M per purchase directly to certified M/WBE vendors. It has done so for streetlight repairs essentially zero times. Our tool exists to change three things at once:
Wealth, not just light. $50M+ per year of NYC streetlight work that currently flows to two large primes could instead route to 101 minority- and women-owned electricians across all five boroughs — at the same per-job cost, under existing law, with no procurement reform required.
Transparency, not friction. Every dispatch logs why a vendor was picked — score, components, demographic identity, distance, prior city work. Reviewers can replay any decision the system makes. Procurement staff get auto-generated PPB Rule 3-08 justification memos in place of hours of paperwork.
Vendors discoverable, not invisible. 1,733 NYC-licensed electricians today hold zero direct city contracts and no M/WBE certification on file. The matrix surfaces the 101 who are eligible, points the next 48 toward eligibility (one missing criterion), and turns the rest into a knowable, geocoded pool the city can actually see.
Three changes. No new laws. Same complaints. Same budget. Different recipients of the dollars.
A streetlight complaint passes through seven stages before a vendor is on-site. Four are paperwork bottlenecks that today take days. The matrix collapses them to seconds — and at step 5, it surfaces a direct-purchase-eligible local vendor instead of defaulting to the two incumbent primes.
Steps 2–5 collapse from roughly a week of paperwork into under two minutes — and at step 5, the matrix routes the work to a vendor the city already has on file but isn't using. Steps 1, 6, and 7 are physical-world events the tool doesn't speed up but also doesn't get in the way of.
The matrix works wherever three conditions stack: a concentrated procurement structure where a handful of firms take most of the dollars, an under-used equity policy lever, and a public vendor roster the city already maintains. We identified three additional NYC 311 categories that fit every condition.
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EPA RRP Firm registry.$60M / yr in equity-redirectable city spending across these three trades, on top of streetlights — distributed across roughly 280 minority- and women-owned NYC firms who pass the same eligibility tests but rarely see direct city work. Same rule. Same matrix. Three new docket categories, three different agencies, one consistent story.
San Francisco is structurally more receptive to this kind of tool than New York. Three converging conditions — a recent procurement scandal, an active Controller's investigation, and a Mayor's office that has explicitly named small-business equity as a priority — line up to make SF the natural second deployment.
SF streetlights are maintained in-house by SFPUC and PG&E — no contractor pool exists to redistribute. SIRP is the right v1 because it has the same shape as our NYC streetlight case:
Unlike NYC, where we still need an institutional bridge to SBS or MOCS, SF gives us viable contact paths in multiple offices:
The ask is the same shape as NYC, easier to land: a 90-day pilot in one DPW district with success criteria of ≥30 dispatches, ≥40% routed to Micro-LBE or LBE firms, and ≥80% citizen satisfaction at the 30-day check-in. No new spending. No new mandates. Just operationalizing a rule the city already enacted, with the transparency layer the Controller's office has already recommended.
Same matrix. Same 8 components. New city. New rule citation. Same story: a 2024 reform that hasn't reached the last mile, and a software problem that closes it.
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Every chart, every claim —
Sources & methodology →