Disparities found in city contracts
A multi-year study has found ethnic and gender disparities in the awarding of contracts by the city of Columbus, according to a study released by Mayor Andrew J. Ginther on Wednesday.
The study found that black males and black females were particularly unsuccessful across the board at getting the city’s prime contracts in construction, professional services and other goods and services, from small contracts to major construction bids of more than $1.55 million.
The study by Mason Tillman Associates, based in Oakland, California, is a necessary legal step in permitting the city to craft new programs to boost the share of the contract pie going to minorities and women — even if doing so costs the city and taxpayers more money.
The study provides a “documented disparity” within targeted groups, allowing the city to “go down the path of a raceand gender-conscious program,” said Damita Brown, the interim director of the city’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
Mason Tillman recommends the city use “bid discounts” when awarding contracts for construction and goods and services. Bid discounts generally have been used by other governmental entities to give preference to minority- or women-owned businesses by “discounting,” or lowering, their bid prices by a certain percentage for the purpose of determining the lowest bid, while still paying the original amount.
For professional services, which are often awarded based on scoring for factors such as a firm’s experience and track record, Mason Tillman recommends “incentive credits,” or extra points to firms that are women- and minority-owned.
“I have complete confidence in this report,” Ginther said Wednesday at a press conference. He said his administration has made improvements in boosting contracts for minorities and women, but he added that “better isn’t good enough in America’s opportunity city.”
Ginther declined to answer questions from The Dispatch after the event.
The Associated General Contractors of Ohio, which represents hundreds of industrial and construction companies in the state and played a role in overturning the city’s most-recent such program in 1996, is monitoring the development, said Richard Hobbs, the group’s president.
“You can’t take from one and give to another without discriminating against somebody,” Hobbs said. “That’s why we have judges; that’s why we have courts.”
Hobbs said he’s not surprised by the study’s conclusions.
“They need to have something that says there was discrimination,” Hobbs said. “They wanted to find it, so they’re going to find it.”
While the study found across-the-board disparities for black males and black females in getting part of the city’s $1.75 billion in prime contracts between 2012 and 2015, it also found certain disparities among Asian males and Asian females, Hispanic males, Native American males and Caucasian females. Almost $1 billion of those contracts were for construction projects.
There were also disparities in the $275.8 million in total subcontract awards, the study said.
Mason Tillman reviewed city records, including vendor contracts, and government certification directories, business-association lists, and attendees of business-community meetings conducted by the study. It also gathered “anecdotal findings,” a practice that has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court when it is used not to determine discrimination but rather to define bestmanagement practices, the study said.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that local and state “minority business enterprise programs” are subject to “strict scrutiny,” and race-conscious programs can remedy only “statistically significant” discrimination, the study says. The Mason Tillman report says all the disparities it identified were statistically significant — not likely to be random or the result of sampling error.
The study is being released more than a year after city officials intended because problems with the data Columbus provided to Mason Tillman were discovered after a draft was finished. The study’s cost grew from $435,000 to up to $685,000, and the city has already paid $572,000.
The final study used data from 2012 to 2015 — prior to Ginther taking office in January 2016 — even though Brown said the process of submitting data to Mason Tillman wrapped up only earlier this year. Asked why more recent data wasn’t used, Brown said the city switched to a new computer system, making comparisons after 2015 “apples to oranges.”
Columbus enacted its first affirmative-action program in 1975, requiring contractors to hire a certain percentage of minority employees. In 1981, the program was changed to include a goal that 10% of construction contracts go to black-owned firms and 2% to women-owned companies.
In 1989, the goals were increased to 21% to black-owned and 10% to women-owned construction firms. But that same year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that governments must prove discrimination exists before trying to remedy it, requiring the city to commission the study of its contract awards.
In 1996, a federal judge threw out the resulting 1992 study, conducted in part by a law firm headed by thenstate Rep. Otto Beatty — the husband of Joyce Beatty, now a Democratic congresswoman from Jefferson Township — ruling that it was filled with inaccurate statistics, sloppy analyses and erroneous conclusions. That made the city’s program unconstitutional, and officials ended it.