Maine’s small rural businesses are on track to bid on some of the billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts, thanks to a U.S. Senate subcommittee vote Thursday.

Acting on a suggestion by Millinocket Town Councilor Bruce McLean, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship voted 18-0 to expand the Small Business Administration’s HUBZone program to include rural Maine regions previously ineligible.

The rural small businesses will be classified as Historically Underutilized Business Zones, qualifying them for federal contracts. This is a reclassification that will occur Oct. 1, the start of the federal government’s new fiscal year, if Congress and President Bush approve it, said U.S. Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, the Republican subcommittee chairwoman who helped engineer the regulation change.

Snowe expected that they would sign off on it and will be meeting soon with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to see that the bill gets fast-tracked. If all goes well, it will be signed in September, she said.

“It has strong bipartisan support. I don’t think we will have anybody holding it up,” Snowe said Thursday.

That the simple regulation change didn’t occur sooner mystified Snowe, who encouraged small businesses to contact the SBA or local economic development agencies, such as McLean’s Millinocket Area Growth and Investment Council, to learn about government bid processes and start bidding on Oct. 1.

“It was inexplicable that a distinction between underutilized rural areas and urban areas was preventing regions in Maine from being certified as HUBZones and taking advantage of this program,” she said Thursday in a statement.

The majority of Maine is in a rural or urban HUBZone, yet less than 1 percent of the state’s 142,000 small businesses are HUBZone-certified, Snowe said.

Her staff held conferences around the state in December to improve awareness, but many businesses remain unaware of the program. She said she is hopeful the regulation alteration would change that.

Exactly how many Maine businesses would benefit from the change is impossible to tell, state Economic Development Commissioner Jack Cashman said. Nor is there any guarantee that Maine businesses will get government contracts, but the state windfall could be considerable.

“Government contracts are a way of life for some companies,” Cashman said late Wednesday.

According to the Small Business Administration, 110 Maine businesses in 11 counties received more than $12.7 million in HUBZone program funds in fiscal year 2005.

McLean gave a 20-minute presentation on HUBZones on June 8 to the Millinocket Town Council. As required by the federal Small Business Reauthorization Act of 1997, HUBZones get 3 percent of the 23 percent of contracts the federal government awards small businesses annually for a huge array of products, McLean said.

About $377.5 billion in federal contracting money was awarded nationwide in 2005. Small firms won $69 billion worth of contracts – or 23 percent of the total – in 2004.

But holes in HUBZone regulations allow parts of Bangor, which has an unemployment rate of about 4 percent, to qualify for HUBZone status, while the Katahdin region, which has a jobless rate of about 12 percent, does not qualify, McLean said.

And the program is probably underutilized in Bangor, which had only a handful of small-business participants, McLean said.

Snowe complimented McLean for making the Maine congressional delegation, which supports the regulation change, aware of the problem.

“He really made a difference,” Snowe said. “Now we want to make sure that all of the eligible businesses that can use the program do so.”