•  Say it could bring billions in new federal contracts to California

•  Would conform contracting to the law, say supporters

Two of the Central Valley’s congressmen are co-sponsoring a bill that supporters say could bring over $10 billion a year in additional federal small business contracts to California.

U.S. Reps. Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, and Jim Costa, D-Fresno, along with Bob Filner, D-Chula Vista, are pushing the “The Fairness and Transparency in Contracting Act” that they say will stop the flow of over $100 billion a year in federal small business contracts to Fortune 1000 firms and thousands of other large businesses.

The bill’s sponsor is Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson, but it was originally written by Lloyd Chapman, president of the American Small Business League of Petaluma. Mr. Chapman has campaigned for years against what he says are proven diversions of federal contracts that were meant for small businesses to some of the nation’s largest corporations.

A July 2008 article from the Associated Press found over 33 percent of all federal small business contracts go to firms in the Washington, D.C., area, he says, with the majority of those companies actually subsidiaries and divisions of Fortune 1000 firms.

The result is that every other state, including California, does not receive a proportional share of government small business contracts, Mr. Chapman says.

The bill, H.R. 2568, is designed to end the diversion of federal small business contracts and double the volume of federal small business contracts to every state in the country, he says.

Source:  http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=12115