Over the past decade, I’ve helped state and local governments modernize the way they buy and deliver services to residents. Now, I lead Partners for Public Good, a mission-driven nonprofit supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies focused on government effectiveness. Having worked with over 200 jurisdictions and in city government myself, I know from experience that it's critical for new mayors to focus on procurement early and use it to deliver tangible wins on their priorities in their first 100 days.
After all, the clock doesn't wait for bureaucracy to catch up with a new mayor's ambition. In a moment when government budgets are tight and public problems are acute, procurement—the oft-overlooked core of city operations through which 25 to 50 percent of tax dollars are spent—is a key leverage point. From our extensive work with city halls, we've seen that new mayors benefit when they treat it as a strategy to spend smarter while maintaining high-quality service delivery. And that they can achieve breakthroughs when they empower procurement staff, who, in turn, can get dollars to work quickly for residents.
Great elected officials don’t just cast a great vision, but also figure out how to get the system to support and carry that vision forward. Procurement is central to that work, and this is a playbook new mayors everywhere can use to unlock its potential.
Know your sellers.
We’ve seen over and over again that engaging directly with their city’s vendors is key to helping mayors understand what gets in the way of achieving their goals. It’s also a critical first step in building trust with people mayors rely on throughout their tenure in office. That’s why we recommend meeting with some city vendors and service providers ASAP, especially the small businesses and nonprofits whose work powers the local economy. In the meeting, it helps to ask them directly about the hardest parts of doing business with the city.
They’ll most likely name some combination of late payments, long procurement cycles, and too much paperwork. And what comes next is critical: Mayors can use this opportunity to really listen and commit to fixing at least some of those vendors’ biggest barriers.
For example, Syracuse, N.Y.,set out to spend more of its dollars locally, but learned that many small businesses were walking away because the city’s contracting process was simply too burdensome. With support from our experts, the city streamlined and digitized access to opportunities. Approval timelines dropped from months to hours, freeing staff to proactively engage local businesses. Vendor registrations tripled, and one of the first contracts awarded under the new system went to a small, local, woman-owned communications firm that had never before worked with government.
From plowing roads to sheltering the unhoused, the vendor community can be critical to service delivery. And what I’ve noticed is that when city leaders engage vendors as partners from the beginning, it shows that they understand the importance of this relationship and begins to establish trust—trust that ultimately translates to better contracts, improved services, and resident impact.
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We’ve found that mayors benefit when they meet their city’s procurement team within days of taking office. This is the group that can make or break their early agenda, and mayors need them to deliver. Typically, procurement teams want two things: for the procurement process to work well, and to come through for their communities, who, after all, are their neighbors. It helps to explicitly let them know you share this goal, and to show them how their work will prove instrumental to your own vision. It’s also valuable to ask what is getting in their way.
We can tell you what you might hear. Through our Procurement Excellence Network of nearly 3,000 procurement professionals from all 50 states, we’ve heard consistently that staff feel locked in reactive mode, siloed in their function, incentivized to focus on risk mitigation, and rarely invited to be strategic. But mayors across the world have proven that they can change all of that—that they can elevate the status of procurement and unlock the talent within that department starting from day one, clearing the path to innovation and impact.
Just this past month, we met with the mayor of a U.S. city who brought their procurement chief into a cabinet meeting to build early engagement across departments for fixing a wide range of contracting issues. The chief wanted department heads to understand the vision for a new way of working, while the department heads wanted the chief to get their procurements out the door quickly. Under the mayor’s artful facilitation, they soon began to realize these goals were one and the same.
A common mistake I see is for mayors to relegate procurement to paperwork or to simply give up on the possibility of improving or reforming back-office systems. But the mayors who decide to treat it as a strategic lever set themselves up to deliver progress on growth, affordability, efficiency, and performance all at once.
Match the city’s pipeline to your priorities.
As mayors connect with their procurement stakeholders inside and outside city hall, another step that often pays dividends is for them to understand their pipeline of upcoming purchases. This list of contracts that are already slated to be procured or renewed is an opportunity to showcase your city making investments of real dollars in real services and projects that reach residents, fast. It’s also a window mayors can use to align contracts that are already in motion with their own agenda.
Our request for proposal (RFP) guidebook is a great tool for this process, as it helps city leaders move procurements quickly, strategically, and innovatively. Too often, we’ve seen new mayors slow the pipeline down while waiting to onboard staff and consider process changes. We encourage them not to waste their first opportunity to capitalize on momentum, and instead get a few key contracts moving to help jumpstart top priorities.
In San Antonio, Texas, the city embedded their Ready to Work Program and associated workforce development metrics into a request for proposals to remodel a veterinary hospital, connecting then-Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s signature education and job-placement initiative with city construction contracts. Vendors who committed to hire or had already hired program trainees were eligible to earn a potential competitive advantage in securing a contract. What’s crucial here is that building a state-of-the-art animal care hospital was already pending in the city’s pipeline; the innovation was linking that work with the program’s higher-level workforce goals.
We’ve helped governments use these approaches to ensure nearly $2 billion in public funds are spent more effectively and efficiently. What unites their leaders is that they don’t see their procurement function as a purchasing arm, but as their delivery accelerator. Embracing procurement by engaging sellers, empowering buyers, and aligning upcoming purchases can help mayors build early credibility with key partners, earn policy points, and show up for residents all at the same time.
We’re here to help. Check out our Procurement Excellence Network and other supports available at partnersforpublicgood.org.
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