we are a dbe firm and we've been here for 15 years. i would like to say our company was pursued with lan ar to manage the program. we are excited about. we have been doing this for 15 years and we have never addressed a program to address the community and more importantly given the resources to achieve it. i would like to elaborate a little bit more. we started in august in this cap program. within our proposal, we were required to have a construction liaison there 50 percent of the team of the opening of the office and we were required to have a project administrator. that was budgeted in the program which was very important to understand that our office is opened from 8-5 everyday. from 8:00 to 12:00 we have a professional liaison. in addition, when that particular construction liaison is not there, the office is covered from 11:00 to 5:00 p.m. with a project administrator and if any one has any issues or blueprints, documents or access to computers or any particular needs that are there. that is totally different than what we've do

. >> could you tell us who the sbe and dbe goal was set and what level is that? is it a certain percentage of the contract? >> yes, it is a percentage of the work assigned to the firms. >> correct. what is that percentage? >> 100 percent. >> the goal is set at 100 percent. >> okay. >> and all firms achieve that goal that we had set. we short listed the firms and we interviewed all of the firms on october 15th. >> what does that mean? >> we reviewed all six proposals and we had a scoring based on the technical merit and the what they showed and the hours that they were intending to do and it was not cost-based in any way, and cost proposals were not reviewed at all and then, the proposals were then... and there were four different reviewers and myself, and a member from cal trans, and the member of the infrastructure and dpw who will be providing the services for their portion. >> okay. >> thank you. >> and short listed we took the top three firms and there was a large gap between the third and fourth ranked firm and so we had the top three firms come in from inte