Sideshows distract from real issue
The Palm Beach County government, despite its best efforts, has a problem with fair treatment when it comes to awarding contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses.
It is a problem that has been documented, analyzed and, yes, confirmed.
County commissioners know this from looking at the available data. They know this because their own residents, taxpayers and small business owners have stood before commissioners, looked them in the eye and told them so.
What some commissioners either don’t seem to know, or maybe have the stomach for, is how to fix it — even though they’ve spent about $1.1 million of taxpayer money on twin disparity studies that give commissioners the necessary guidance to do so.
But now, in addition to years of slow-walking a solution to the problem, we have distractions. Embarrassing distractions. And we have a rift along racial lines that may be next-to-impossible to repair if commissioners don’t begin leading instead of reacting.
Our commission is actually suing Mason Tillman Associates, the consultant hired to help the county identify racial and gender disparity problems in the county’s and Solid Waste Authority’s (SWA) contracting process. Not for doing a poor job, mind you, but for background documents that include the names of aggrieved small business owners who spoke freely but on condition of anonymity.
These women- and minority-owned firms fear financial retaliation from larger, white male-owned firms represented by the Associated General Contractors (AGC), the trade group fighting genderand race-based targets. Those targets have already been accepted for the SWA, and could be before the county sometime this fall.
To ignore the smaller firms’ concerns about retaliation is to dismiss the fact that the deck is already stacked against them. But the AGC has the right to request the data. And the county has little legal choice but to do the same, and demand Mason Tillman hand over public documents.
As an aside, it is actually heartening to learn that despite more than 1,200 exemptions, Florida’s landmark Sunshine laws remain among the strongest in the nation. The real problem here is that Mason Tillman should have done its homework on those laws before taking such an important job.
Regardless, this dustup should have no bearing on the studies’ results.
The 2009-2013 data on county contracting show that firms owned by white men received a disproportionate share of public dollars.
Female-owned firms, though 19 percent of the professional services market, won only 9.8 percent of the contracts and 5.9 percent of all the money paid. Firms owned by their white male counterparts managed to snag 72.5 percent of the contracts and 74.8 percent of the money, though they made up only 57.1 percent of the market.
A similar level of disparity involved black- and Hispanic-owned firms in prime construction, and goods and services contracts.
These findings, which confirm years of complaints from women- and minority-owned firms, could not be more timely. They arrive as the county begins a 10-year spending binge of an estimated $810 million in sales tax revenue to fix roads, bridges and county-owned facilities.
But change isn’t easy. It’s no surprise that with this kind of money on the line, some pretty raw emotions get exposed — from those trying to change as well as maintain the status quo. Throw in the issue of race, and you’ve got a powder keg.
We should be able to depend on our elected leaders to keep a lid on these situations. That’s why Commissioner Steve Abrams’ back-and-forth with local minority contractor Tina White is distressing. As is County Mayor Melissa McKinlay’s shutdown of all public comment at an Aug. 21 informational meeting.
Again, emotions are raw here. Residents must be respectful of the commission’s role and responsibility. But telling people who believe that they have been wronged for years to essentially sit down and shut up is not helpful.
Whether or not your phone is “ringing off the hook asking for this program” is not, and never should be a prerequisite to doing the right thing.
All of these sideshows detract from what should be everyone’s real focus: fixing a problem to the benefit of all county taxpayers, residents and visitors.
We have a rift along racial lines that may be nextto-impossible to repair if commissioners don’t begin leading instead of reacting.