KVIG Informative

Clark County’s own purchasing data shows that minority-owned business contracting collapsed 98.6 percent in one year. Women-owned business contracting fell to zero. Small Nevada businesses saw non-discretionary contract awards drop 100 percent in the first months of 2025. The firms collecting the county’s infrastructure work are publicly traded multinational corporations headquartered in Los Angeles, Dallas, Montreal, and London. The county has a program designed to prevent exactly this. The numbers suggest it is not working.

CLARK COUNTY, NEVADA | May 2026

Clark County publishes a purchasing performance summary every year. The document tracks how the county spends its contracting dollars, broken down by business type, size, ownership, and whether the firm is based in Nevada.

The list names 81 active contracts as of June 26, 2025. Reviewing the firms that appear at the top of the rankings across multiple service categories reveals a consistent pattern.

WSP USA Inc. appears in the top five rankings across 15 of the 20 service categories on the list. It holds awarded contracts in flood control, limited access roadways, streets and road repair, traffic management, surveying, and urban arterial design.

WSP USA is the American subsidiary of WSP Global, a publicly traded engineering and professional services firm headquartered in Montreal, Canada. WSP Global reported revenues of approximately $14 billion in 2024. It has executed a decades-long acquisition strategy, purchasing Parsons Brinckerhoff for $1.4 billion in 2014, Golder Associates for $1.4 billion in 2021, and the environmental and infrastructure division of Wood Group for $2.3 billion in 2022.

Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. appears in the top five rankings across 14 of the 20 categories. It holds awarded contracts including the Sloan Lane, Vegas Valley Drive to Ruby Creek Drive project and the Spring Mountain Road and Tropicana Avenue corridor projects.

Jacobs is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Its annual revenue exceeds $16 billion.

AECOM Technical Services appears in the top five across 11 categories and holds awarded contracts on the Tropicana Avenue and Durango Drive to Jones Boulevard Phase 1 project and others.

AECOM is headquartered in Los Angeles, California, and is publicly traded. Its annual revenue exceeds $14 billion. Its infrastructure business benefited from a record backlog driven by the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, which authorized $1.2 trillion in federal spending, $550 billion of it new money, for transportation, broadband, water, and energy projects.

Atkins, which is the American brand of AtkinsRealis, formerly SNC-Lavalin, appears in the top five across 12 categories and holds active contracts on the Fort Apache Road corridor, the Flamingo Wash, and the Hacienda Avenue rehabilitation project.

AtkinsRealis is headquartered in Montreal, Canada. Its annual revenue exceeds $9 billion.

HNTB Corporation appears in the top five across 9 categories. HDR appears in the top five across 11. Kimley-Horn appears in the top five across 8. Stantec appears in the top five in flood control, hydraulic engineering, and structural engineering. Parsons, a Pasadena, California-based firm publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, appears in the traffic engineering category.

Every firm named above is a publicly traded multinational or a large privately held national corporation headquartered outside Nevada.

What Small Means Here

Under Nevada law, a Small Business Enterprise is defined as a Nevada business with gross annual sales not exceeding $2 million. That is the firm that cannot afford to maintain a proposal writing team on retainer. That is the firm whose principal engineer is also doing the billing. That is the firm whose bonding capacity limits the size of project it can bid on without a partner.

Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 332 governs purchasing by local governments. Chapter 338 governs public works construction. Both require competitive bidding for contracts above $100,000, with public advertisement in a newspaper of general circulation at least seven days before bid opening.

The threshold matters. Competitive bidding is the mechanism by which public infrastructure dollars are theoretically opened to all qualified bidders. But the Statement of Qualifications process that precedes competitive bidding on professional services contracts creates a pre-qualified list. Only firms on that list can compete for Clark County Public Works professional services contracts.

Getting on the SOQ list requires meeting bonding requirements, insurance thresholds, experience documentation standards, and staffing minimums that are calibrated to the scale of projects the county manages. A firm doing $8 million in annual revenue in Nevada can meet those thresholds. A firm doing $1.5 million cannot.

The SOQ list for 2024-2025 contains 81 active contracts and dozens of pre-qualified firms. Of the firms appearing in the top five rankings across multiple service categories, the overwhelming majority are national or multinational corporations. Local Nevada firms that appear at the top of rankings in multiple categories include GCW Inc., VTN Nevada, and CA Group. All three are Nevada-based engineering firms with significant local histories. They are not the mom-and-pop contractors the original question describes. They are established mid-sized Nevada firms competing against firms with billion-dollar annual revenues.

The Federal DBE Framework

Federal law requires agencies receiving U.S. Department of Transportation funding to implement Disadvantaged Business Enterprise programs under 49 CFR Part 26. The program is designed to ensure that small businesses owned by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals have the opportunity to compete for federally funded contracts.

The U.S. DOT sets a 10 percent aspirational goal for DBE participation nationally. The Environmental Protection Agency sets an 8 percent aspirational goal.

The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, which manages federally funded transportation projects in Clark County, established a DBE goal of 2.3 percent for Federal Fiscal Years 2026 through 2028. That figure is broken into a race-neutral goal of 1.0 percent and a race-conscious goal of 1.3 percent.

A 2.3 percent goal against a 10 percent federal aspiration represents a significant gap. The RTC’s goal is based on a 2023 Disparity Study, a formal analysis of the availability of DBE firms relative to their utilization in the agency’s contracting. The disparity study is publicly available.

The study documents the gap between the share of ready, willing, and able DBE firms in the market and the share of contract dollars they actually receive. Where a disparity exists between availability and utilization, agencies are authorized to set race-conscious goals to correct it. The RTC’s 2023 disparity study found sufficient disparity to justify a race-conscious goal, but set that goal at 1.3 percent.

NDOT’s DBE Supportive Services program provides technical assistance to small firms seeking DBE certification and contract opportunities. The program helps with certification, proposal writing, capacity building, and connections to prime contractors. Its existence acknowledges the structural barriers facing small firms. Its budget is a small fraction of the infrastructure spending it is designed to democratize.

The Structural Barriers

The displacement of small and locally owned contractors from public infrastructure work in Clark County is not primarily the result of corruption or explicit preference for large firms. It is the result of procurement structures that systematically favor scale.

Bonding requirements for large infrastructure projects require surety bonds that small firms cannot obtain. A firm must demonstrate the financial capacity to complete a project if something goes wrong. The bonding market for small firms is more expensive, harder to access, and capped at lower amounts than for large firms with established credit histories and diversified revenue streams.

Professional liability insurance requirements for engineering and design contracts carry minimum limits that are calibrated to the size of projects Clark County manages, not to the size of firms that might want to compete for them.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed into law in November 2021 as Public Law 117-58, authorized $1.2 trillion in federal spending over five years. States and localities began receiving allocations in 2022. The law included DBE requirements for all federally funded transportation contracts, but the scale of the funding also created conditions that accelerated consolidation in the engineering and construction industry.

Publicly traded firms with record backlogs and access to capital markets can absorb more work, staff up more quickly, and maintain the compliance infrastructure the federal grants require, including Davis-Bacon prevailing wage administration, federal reporting obligations, and Buy America material sourcing documentation. Small firms can do this work, but the administrative burden per dollar of contract value is significantly higher for a three-person firm than for a three-thousand-person firm.

Construction Dive reported in August 2023 that AECOM, Jacobs, Parsons, and WSP all reported revenue growth of 9 to more than 30 percent in the quarter, driven directly by federal infrastructure law funding. Record backlogs. Record revenues. The firms collecting Clark County’s infrastructure contracts are benefiting from federal money designed to rebuild American public works while the small Nevada businesses those contracts were supposed to reach are receiving, per the county’s own data, zero dollars in the first months of 2025.

The Rock Solid Investigation

Clark County’s own internal procurement process came under scrutiny in 2025 when the county’s Public Works Department strengthened its protocols following an investigation into contracting practices.

The investigation, reported by local press as ongoing as of July 2025, involved the relationship between the department and Rock Solid Project Solutions, a firm that appears on the county’s SOQ list and was ranked highly in pre-qualification processes by employees reporting to a department official. The county subsequently announced it would require disclosure of conflicts of interest with subcontractors, assign a purchasing analyst to provide additional oversight, and recruit a management-level employee to oversee administrative operations including contracts and procurement.

The county has declined to publicly release the findings of its construction management investigations, as of July 2025. That information is not available in the public record.

What is in the public record is the county’s own purchasing data, the SOQ ranking list, and the DBE goals that govern federally funded work. Read together, they describe a contracting environment in which the structural advantages of scale compound over time.

The firms at the top of the SOQ list have been on it for multiple SOQ periods. WSP USA holds contracts from the 2011-2012 period. Atkins holds contracts from the 2012-2014 period. Jacobs holds contracts from the 2015-2016 period. Pre-qualification begets relationship. Relationship begets ranking. Ranking begets more contracts. The cycle does not require anyone to intend an outcome for the outcome to be consistent.

What the Law Requires and What Happens

Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 332 requires Clark County to advertise contracts above $100,000 in a newspaper of general circulation at least seven days before bid opening. The Clark County Water Reclamation District publishes all such advertisements in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The law creates a process. It does not guarantee an outcome. A small Nevada plumbing contractor who sees the advertisement must still meet the bonding threshold, the insurance requirement, the prevailing wage compliance system, and the federal reporting obligations before submitting a bid. The advertisement is the starting line. The finish line is significantly farther away for a firm without the infrastructure of a multinational.

The County Manager’s Office purchasing summary contains one additional data point worth noting. The document defines Nevada Business Enterprise as a Nevada business owned or controlled by individuals not designated as socially or economically disadvantaged. That is the category that received $38 million in non-discretionary awards in 2024. Most of that money goes to mid-sized Nevada firms, not to the multinational corporations at the top of the SOQ list.

The multinationals collect their revenue through the professional services pre-qualification process, the SOQ list, the design and construction management categories. The construction work, the actual physical building of roads, flood control channels, and bridges, is bid separately under the Works categories, where local and regional contractors compete more directly.

The professional services side, design, engineering, program management, environmental review, is where the consolidation is most pronounced and most consequential. It is also where the decisions are made about how projects are scoped, what materials are specified, and which subcontractors get recommended. The firm that designs the project shapes the supply chain for everything that follows.

What Would Change It

The Clark County Commission has authority over the SOQ process. It can set bonding thresholds, adjust insurance minimums, create set-aside programs for small Nevada firms, and establish mentor-protege arrangements that allow small firms to partner with larger ones on contracts they could not otherwise access.

The Nevada Legislature can amend Chapters 332 and 338 of the Nevada Revised Statutes to expand small business preferences in public procurement. Several states have enacted small business set-aside programs for contracts below specific dollar thresholds, reserving a portion of public contracting for firms that could not otherwise compete against firms with billion-dollar revenues.

The Regional Transportation Commission’s DBE goal of 2.3 percent can be raised. The 2023 disparity study that underlies the goal is a public document that can be challenged or updated. The methodology for measuring availability and utilization can be revised to better capture the market of small Nevada firms that are qualified but not winning.

The federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included provisions specifically requiring agencies to report DBE utilization data annually to the U.S. DOT. That data is public. Clark County’s DBE utilization reports for federally funded projects are submitted to the federal government and are available through public records requests.

The county’s own purchasing data is already public. It shows what happened to small business contracting in 2024-2025 and projects what can happen in 2026. Those numbers are not a forecast. They are a finding. The question of whether anyone in a position to change the structure has read them is one the public record cannot answer.

Sources: Clark County Manager’s Office 2025 Purchasing Performance Summary (clarkcountynv.gov, accessed May 2026); Clark County Public Works SOQ Ranking List 2024-2025 (clarkcountynv.gov, accessed May 2026); Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada Supplier Diversity Program page (rtcsnv.com, DBE goal FFY 2026-2028 of 2.3%, 2023 Disparity Study cited); Nevada Department of Transportation DBE Program page (dot.nv.gov); Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 332 and Chapter 338; 49 CFR Part 26; Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Public Law 117-58 (November 15, 2021); WSP Global Annual Report 2024; Jacobs Engineering Group SEC filings 2024; AECOM Annual Report 2024; AtkinsRealis Annual Report 2024; Clark County Water Reclamation District Procurement Solutions page (cleanwaterteam.com); Clark County 2025 public contracting protocols memo (July 18, 2025).