When Damian Espinoza applied to the finance department in the City of Brownsville in late 2020, he thought it would be “just another job.” For six years he had been employed at a bank, rising to the position of credit analyst. “I never thought that I’d work in the public sector,” he says. “And I never thought I’d work in procurement.”

Espinoza’s new job was as a senior buyer. Since Brownsville, a city of about 193,000, didn’t have a separate procurement department, he worked directly for finance, helping city departments with a variety of purchases and contracts.

It wasn’t long before he realized his job was not just about getting a paycheck but was giving him a sense of fulfilment. “I began seeing how the projects I worked on directly benefitted Brownsville residents,” he remembers. “That experience helped me understand that procurement plays an important role in turning city priorities into tangible services and improvements for the community.”

As he learned more about procurement, Espinoza began supervising other buyers and in 2024, he became director of Brownsville’s newly created Department of Procurement.

With an eye on other cities’ innovations, he began to shift his department’s culture from an emphasis solely on compliance to one that recognized the role procurement could play in helping the city reach its goals.

His drive to innovate and improve procurement occurred simultaneously with other management improvements within the city. This included an emphasis on a “One City” approach in contrast to departments working in their own silos. The city’s 2024-2025 strategic goals also included an emphasis on transparency and accountability as well as the promotion of organizational values and culture.

What’s more, a number of Brownsville’s Governance Pillars -- strengthening economic development, growing the city’s tax revenue, attracting new businesses, and strengthening job and wealth creation – connected in clear ways with the job of procurement professionals.

At the same time, Espinoza saw that procurement could help strengthen local suppliers with growing their own business.

Building a foundation

To improve Brownsville procurement, he needed the right foundation and that meant hiring a staff that could work as a team and could fit with the culture he pictured. “I wanted to make sure we emphasized innovation,” he says.

An important change was in the way that procurement worked with other departments. Instead of waiting for them to reach out to buyers with their requests, he moved to a proactive approach, planning with city departments as soon as their budget was passed. This helped identify priorities, move away from informal sporadic procurement practices and open the possibility for longer-term contracts that could achieve a better price, potential department savings, enhanced efficiency and more time for market research.

At the same time, it was critical to change the relationship with vendors through more intentional outreach, improved communication, a focus on transparency, and training on how to interact successfully with Brownsville.

To provide more of an opportunity for local vendors, Espinoza also secured city council and city leadership approval to update the Brownsville procurement policy to add language that would boost local business opportunities for selected solicitations.

Moving Forward

Spurred by his own interest in innovating, Espinoza began tapping expertise outside of Brownsville, developing relationships with the Alliance for Innovation, NIGP, the Institute for Public Procurement, and Civic Marketplace.

For Al Hleileh, co-founder and CEO of Civic Marketplace, Espinoza’s desire to transform Brownsville procurement practices, signaled that he was a “change agent.”

As Hleileh says, “I interact with a lot of local government folks and there are, of course, folks who don’t want anything to change. But there are a lot who want to innovate, to change and to improve. I see that as part of Damian’s story.”

Through a partnership with Civic Marketplace, Brownsville has been one of the first entities to make use of Civic Marketplace’s “First Quote” program, which gives local vendors in different cities quick access to their own city or county’s immediate purchase or service needs for items that are priced under $100,000.

For Brownsville, the “First Quote” initiative provides the opportunity for vendors to feed basic information about their products and business into Brownsville’s internal supplier database. By providing qualifying information on their products and business, suppliers are able to get immediate access to product or service needs posted by the city.  It is then able to immediately see any products or services that city departments say they need, as well as the requirements and timetable that will help inform the bid they make.

Brownsville is also one of more than a dozen local governments that have recently become leads for cooperative contracting through Civic Marketplace. For Brownsville, this means that a selection of the contracts that the eight-person procurement department creates can be of use to other entities that may have fewer financial resources and fewer staff or expertise to do their own solicitations.

As Hleileh says, newly created cooperative contracts from Brownsville, and other cities, help to save the time and effort for multiple small governments that often replicate the same RFPs. As he says, cooperative contracting “saves everyone time, builds better practices and helps smaller entities get volume-based discounts.” At no cost to Brownsville or other of its lead cooperative contracting partners, Civic Marketplace also shares its artificial intelligence expertise when it comes to vendor proposal evaluations.

Focusing on a regional approach

Taking a regional approach to procurement is a key aspect of Espinoza’s plan, as he strongly believes that cities and counties in the same region need to work together to help each other. This matches closely with a report that was recently highlighted on this website from the Brookings Institution, which cited the need for regional collaboration at the state level as an important element of economic development.

One way that Espinoza has supported a regional approach was through its most recent vendor fair in October 2025. “Instead of doing this just as a city vendor fair, I started thinking, ‘Why don’t we do a regional approach’, inviting the county, our school district, the port and any other interested business that may want to participate.”

The next vendor fair is tentatively planned for January 2027 with Espinoza considering even wider regional collaboration, including colleges and universities, other counties in the south Texas region and a variety of towns and cities, including Starbase, a very small city just 20 miles east of Brownsville. With a population of just 500 in 2025, Starbase is the SpaceX South Texas launch site.

“The more entities that participate, the greater the sense of excitement from suppliers because that gives them an opportunity to truly showcase their services,” he says.

To Espinoza, a regional approach provides more business opportunities for local vendors and provides an additional benefit of increased learning, as government managers share information about the more difficult parts of their jobs and their most prized success stories.

The Brownsville Model

To Marcheta Gillespie, the executive director of NIGP Consulting, “the word innovation means something very different to different people.” In her role, she sees multiple other cities and counties that have far greater resources than others and have been making procurement advances over many years.

She sees the importance of the Brownsville story as inspirational to many government entities. While compliance issues are always critical, she notes that Espinoza “is reaching out to other cities and has taken procurement from a function that was very focused on compliance to something that is much more focused on strategic goals and on working together collaboratively with departments and suppliers.

“This is a great story for other communities, especially small communities that don’t have a procurement function. It’s a great example of what is possible if you have the vision.”

This article was supported by and written in partnership with Civic Marketplace.

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