s and Hispanics already total 40% of all judicial appointments and women another 40% (Equity in Hiring). Bush's plan is obviously not to take jobs away from minorities, but to give even more opportunities to them.Opportunities such as federal and state contracts for minorities will not be hindered by ONE FLORIDA either. Statistics show that at present "less than 1% of all available state contracting is done with certified racial and ethnic minority businesses under the current 'goals' system" (Equity in Contracting). Bush believes that a percentage such as this is low because few minority businesses in South Florida even bother to go through the state certification process. The current process for state certification is almost identical to that of the local process, making it a doubly tedious task to obtain both state and local certifications (ONE FLORIDA Myths). ONE FLORIDA will streamline the process in order to give minority businesses the opportunity to participate in state contracting. In addition to streamlining the application process, the requirements for certification will become less rigid. The Governor has asked Legislation to "consider using gross sales rather than net worth as the measure of size for certification" (Improvements to the ONE FLORIDA Initiative). Currently the law sets certification limits on minority businesses that exceed a net worth of $3 million. These innovations will hopefully encourage more minorities to apply for certification.Once certification is no longer an issue, the task of building relationships between procuring agents and minority businesses must be addressed. One major problem that Bush sees is that much of Florida's state business is done as a result of long-standing relationships between State procurement agents and vendors, minority businesses often find it difficult to 7break in(Equity in Contracting). Seeing as the bulk of the minority population and its businesses are located in Sout...
