The City of Saint Paul Vendor Outreach Program (VOP) is a business assistance program aimed at helping woman-owned, minority-owned, and small businesses (WBE, MBE, SBE). Under the program, the City establishes annual goals and project-specific goals for purchasing from WBEs, MBEs and SBEs in a variety of products/service categories.

The majority of contracting opportunities are in the following areas, where goals may be set on individual projects:

Program staff also provides:

To be eligible for the Vendor Outreach Program, businesses must be certified through the CERT Program, which is a centralized certification process for the City of Saint Paul, Ramsey County, and Hennepin County. 

Businesses must demonstrate that they are owned and controlled by women or minorities, or must meet certain revenue guidelines. Once certification documents have been approved, businesses are certified for all participating jurisdictions.  The online application, additional eligibility information and directories of certified businesses can be found on the CERT Program website.

Feel free to print a copy of our flyer announcement of the new CERT online application.

Office hours for certification questions are Mondays and Wednesdays from 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m (Noon). To better assist our customers, we recommend that you contact us to set-up an appointment.

VOP documents you may need when bidding on or participating on City-funded projects:

• Business Opportunities Template (BOT)
• General Contractor Utilization Commitment
• Good Faith Efforts
• Identification of Prime Contractor and Subcontractors (PDF)
• Identification of Prime Contractor and Subcontractors (Excel)
• Subcontractor Intent to Perform
• Vendor Outreach Questionnaire
• VOP Goal Status Report