Sessions
ADA Compliance
2:00 PM - 3:45 PM Thu
Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) Program Management
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM Thu
Dr. John Cleveland is a transportation civil rights consultant and owner of Cleveland Civil Rights Consulting, LLC. He specializes in training, program and policy development and federal compliance, as well as expert witness services. He served as a senior instructor for the National Transit Institute (NTI) at Rutgers University teaching transit civil rights and safety courses, serving in that capacity for nine years. In January 2018 he began working as an instructor for the Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) developing and instructing a new two day course on Reservations Scheduling and Dispatching for paratransit systems. He conducts this course throughout the country.
During a period of 15 years with the City of Phoenix, Dr. Cleveland ensured compliance and oversight for five areas of federal civil rights law compliance in transit systems region wide (Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Environmental Justice, Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) Program Management, and Equal Employment Opportunity). He served as the liaison between the City of Phoenix Public Transit Department and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) in matters of civil rights compliance and provided guidance to ten subrecipient cities, Maricopa County, the Regional Public Transportation Authority, METRO Light Rail, and seven bus contractors regarding federal civil rights compliance.
He worked in all aspects of DBE program compliance in the City of Phoenix with both the Equal Opportunity Department and the Public Transit Department as the Civil Rights Manager. He certified over 600 small minority and woman business as Disadvantaged Business Enterprises, Minority Business Enterprises and Woman Business Enterprises.
Dr. Cleveland conducted on site contract compliance monitoring on 14 federally funded transit construction projects totaling 178 million in contract dollars. Compliance monitoring focused on the certification and utilization of minority and woman owned subcontractors under the provisions of the federal Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program.
He managed over 45 FTA assisted contracts, annually averaging $20 million, with annual DBE contract awards averaging $4 million. He monitored DBE utilization on METRO light rail contracts, averaging $64 million annually. Dr. Cleveland personally developed the multi-year project DBE goal for the 1.4 billion dollar METRO light rail system and established contract DBE goals for all FTA assisted contracts in the region.
Dr. Cleveland conducted five regional workshops for 12 subrecipient cities and agencies on DBE program management including the completion of the Uniform Report of DBE Awards/Commitments and Payments.