Portland Community College program opens doors for underrepresented

Daily Journal of Commerce (Portland, OR), Aug 15, 2003 by Stephanie Basalyga

Mike Kolodziejczak is back at school. Only this time, he's not sitting behind a desk.

A graduate of Portland Community College's landscape technology program, Kolodziejczak (pronounced ko-lo-ZHAY-zhack) recently nabbed a $500,000 contract to handle landscape work at the college's Southeast Center, now under construction at Southeast 82nd Avenue and Division Street in Portland.

The project is part of a list of new construction work made possible by a $144 million construction bond approved by voters in November 2000.

Included in the bond was a provision that allowed the college to create its Minority, Women and Emerging Small Business program, which works to ensure that a portion of the subcontractor work for each construction project funded by the bond is set aside specifically for historically underrepresented businesses.

That's how Kolodziejczak initially qualified for his Southeast Center contract. His 18-month-old company, New Growth Landscape, is considered an emerging small business.

It enabled us to establish ourselves to go out and say, 'Look, we're able to do these big jobs.' Kolodziejczak said. It enabled us to compete against the big boys.

Kolodziejczak started his Beaverton-based company already armed with resources, including hands-on work with firms such as Cedar Landscape and Teufel Nursery while he attended the PCC landscape program in the mid-1990s.

By the time he was ready to step out on his own a little less than two years ago, he also had a wide network of industry contracts, which helped when it came to snagging those first commercial jobs in the private industry.

Winning a piece of the $19 million construction cost of the PCC Southeast Center, however, provides an opportunity to expand his company's resume to public project work - and a highly visible public project at that.

The 95,000-square-foot Southeast Center, which is actually two separate structures that will be connected, is slated to open in winter 2004 as a replacement for an older building the college owns about four blocks south of the new facility, said PCC spokeswoman Susan Hereford.

The older center, which PCC plans to sell to Goodwill Industries, served 5,600 credit students and 4,400 noncredit students during the 1999-2000 school year. College administrators predict the new center will allow PCC to expand its service to about 1,400 more students.

Hereford said a total of $2.7 million worth of construction work being done by the college this year - in addition to the center, new buildings are under way at PCC's Rock Creek, Cascade and Sylvania campuses - has been set aside for women-, minority-owned and small emerging businesses like Kolodziejczak's. The contracts are awarded through a traditional low-bid process.

In addition to being able to work with well-established companies like Baugh Skanska and Walker Macy, which are handling general contractor and landscape architect duties for the Southeast Center, winning an emerging small business contract to work on a PCC project holds a special meaning for Kolodziejczak.

It is very neat to come back and say this is the school that enabled me to develop my career path and here I am doing a half-a- million-dollar job for them, he said. It's gratifying to be able to give something back.