Miami International Airport (MIA) Wins State, National Awards For Supporting Disadvantaged Businesses

MIAMI – Miami-Dade Aviation Department (MDAD) Associate Director of Minority Affairs Milton Collins received the Minority Enterprise Development (MED) Week Advocate of the Year Award during the 30th Annual MEDWeek awards presentation on October 19 at Florida International University’s Kovens Conference Center. Collins was recognized at the annual event among more than 400 attendees from across Florida for leading the efforts at Miami International Airport to support small, minority and women’s disadvantaged business enterprises (DBE).

MDAD’s Minority Affairs Division was responsible for increasing DBE concession participation at MIA to 31.8 percent of the airport’s gross revenue in fiscal year 2011, which far exceeds the Federal Aviation Administration’s three-year goal of 20 percent for fiscal years 2011 to 2013. Gross revenues by concessions at MIA totaled more than $360 million, with $114.5 million generated by 61 Airport Concession Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (ACDBE) firms.

MDAD’s Minority Affairs Division credits its success to hosting monthly outreach meetings with the business community to provide six-month bid forecasts and pro bono legal, financial and human resources assistance, as well as organizing industry output conferences and pre-bid and pre-construction meetings with bidders and the community at large. Concessionaires at MIA have also benefited from passenger growth of 7.4 percent in fiscal year 2011 and overall concession revenue growth of 24 percent in fiscal year 2011.

In the past five years, Minority Affairs Division has conducted 217 outreach activities, 26 more than its business plan target of 191. The monthly outreach meetings have attracted the attendance of other Miami-Dade County departments and institutions as an effective way to communicate with DBE and ACDBE firms.

The MEDWeek Conference is the nation’s premier event for minority entrepreneurs and small business owners at the national, regional and local levels. The local MEDWeek in Florida is observed and hosted under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency’s (MBDA) Business Center. MEDWeek is designed to help small and minority-owned firms succeed in the local and global markets through educational and business-to-business networking events.

In June, MIA also received the FAA’s 2012 DBE Advocate and Partner Award and the Airport Minority Advisory Council’s (AMAC) 2012 Airport Concessions Award during the annual Airport Business Diversity Conference hosted by the AMAC in St. Louis, Missouri, in recognition of significantly increasing ACDBE participation at MIA and for overall support of the FAA’s DBE program.

“We are extremely proud to be recognized by the MBDA, the FAA and the AMAC as a national leader in the DBE industry,” said Milton L. Collins, MDAD Associate Director of Minority Affairs. “Our goal is to level the playing field between small and large businesses at MIA, and these awards certainly help show we are achieving that goal.”