Metropolitan Council hears DBE re-evaluation update as staff target July 8 cutoff to restore program functions

Council members on June 10 were briefed on the Metropolitan Council's progress re-evaluating disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE) certifications after a U.S. Department of Transportation interim final rule required firms certified before October 2025 to re-establish eligibility.

Ashanti Payne, director of the Office of Civil Rights and Small Business Programs, told the council the Metropolitan Council serves as a lead agency in the Minnesota Unified Certification Program (MNUCP) alongside MnDOT, the Metropolitan Airports Commission and the City of Minneapolis and that council staff have been coordinating a regional response.

Megan Soulberg, senior manager of the council's small business unit, said the October 2025 rule removed a longstanding presumption of social and economic disadvantage and required every previously certified firm to complete a new, affirmative re-evaluation. "Until those firms complete that re-evaluation process, we were really halted for all DBE activities," Soulberg said, explaining that the rule initially stopped the council from setting DBE participation goals and from counting DBE participation on projects.

Soulberg provided the council with numerical context for the scale of the work: at the IFR effective date the UCP had 1,347 DBEs in its directory and the Metropolitan Council had 350; of the UCP's 933 Minnesota-based firms, 421 had submitted re-evaluations and the council had 125 submitted re-evaluations of its roughly 296 Minnesota-based firms (figures presented as of the week before the meeting). She said many interstate-certified firms were automatically decertified elsewhere and must re-evaluate in their home state before resuming reciprocity.

To accelerate processing, the UCP and council began supportive services (workshops and one-on-one narrative coaching) and contracted follow-on assistance; staff said the trainings materially improved the quantity and quality of re-evaluation submissions. Soulberg said the UCP set a working target of July 8 to complete priority-window re-evaluations so agencies can report completion to DOT and resume normal program activity. "We will be sending a final request for information and they'll get five more business days and then our plan is we will be processing those with what information was provided at the time," Soulberg said.

Staff also outlined near-term operational steps: updated program plans have been submitted, the council will re-assess triennial DBE goals (staff noted prior FTA and EPA goal examples of 13.4% and 11.9%), and a contractor-hosted application platform referenced in the briefing (B2G in the transcript) is scheduled to go live July 13 to accept new applications and to support renewals.

Council members asked whether the re-evaluation process had changed the demographic composition of the certified pool. Payne and Soulberg said the IFR prohibits treating race or gender as the basis for presumptions of disadvantage and staff therefore could not and would not make eligibility determinations based on race; Soulberg said the firms processed to date largely align with prior directory demographics but cautioned availability and composition may shift when applications reopen.

Council members pressed staff on economic impacts and tracking. Payne said staff will analyze how the pause and re-evaluation affected procurement and small-business participation and will return with data; Council Member Tony Carter asked staff to quantify impacts to the council and to small firms so the council can better understand delay-related effects.

The council thanked staff for outreach and the incident-command approach they used to coordinate across departments during the rapid regulatory change. The presentation closed with staff noting the July 8 target for priority processing and the July 13 contractor platform go-live as the next procedural steps.

The council did not take formal action on policy changes at the meeting; staff said they will return with revised goals and impact assessments as the re-evaluation work and federal guidance continue.