Over the past 20 years, St Louis County has studied just about everything.
There was the St. Louis County Family Courts facility study, the St. Louis County Arterial Study, the South Study Area in the early 2000s, the Jamestown Mall Study in 2009 and 2010, the Northwest Parkway EIS Study in August 2012, the St Louis County Housing Study, the South County Connector Study in January 2013, and in March 2013 a study on how County residents feel about where they live.
St. Louis County also has a Strategic Plan it updates every five years, a plan that has never included a diversity policy with respect to how the county spends taxpayers dollars. Disparity studies are a first step to identifying discrimination. Any governmental entity that is serious about leveling the playing field for minorities and women must be willingly to take this most important first step.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld that disparity studies are a reasonable and necessary first step to identify situations in which certain types of businesses could be disadvantaged in government spending due to current or past discriminatory practices or behaviors. The Court concluded that remedying discrimination is a compelling governmental interest, especially when there is abundant statistical evidence of discrimination.
In the St. Louis region, Metro, the Missouri Department of Transportation, and the St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) have completed disparity studies. The City of St. Louis and the St. Louis Community College District are moving forward with disparity studies.
But not in St. Louis County. The County – governed by an African American, County Executive Charlie A. Dooley – has backed out of its commitment to conduct a study in conjunction with the City.
Hey, Charlie, the African-American taxpayers of St. Louis County want to know if the County is spending a fair share of its tax dollars with minorities. Don’t you? One wonders.
When MSD released the results of its disparity study, the St. Louis County Executive’s Office responded by securing the services of Colette Holt & Associates of Oakland, Calif. to critique the MSD study, apparently as a means of attacking the results of the MSD study.
Colette Holt & Associates is a member of the NERA Economic Consulting team and a direct competitor of Mason Tillman & Associates, the firm that conducted the MSD study. The fact that Colette Holt is a direct competitor of Mason Tillman creates a situation in which Colette Holt has a special interest tending to interfere with the proper exercise of judgment of Mason Tillman’s work product.
The County has refused to release any documents associated with the no-bid, sole-source hiring of Colette Holt & Associates to review the MSD study. Most recently, the NERA Consulting Team (including Colette Holt & Associates) conducted a disparity study for the City of Cleveland that had disastrous results for Cleveland and city officials.
A February 21 news article titled “Cleveland minority contractors demand that disparity consultant refund Cleveland for $758,000 study, call report ‘bogus’” reported that “40 minority contractors or their representatives gathered in the lobby of City Hall, calling the report by the NERA team a fraud and insisting that Mayor Frank Jackson and federal prosecutors launch an investigation of the no-bid contract and NERA’s methodology.”
It appears that the ruckus was caused by a Cleveland Plain Dealer story which “uncovered that large portions of NERA Team’s 708-page report are similar or nearly identical to studies the company did for other governments.” The Plain Dealer found “that apart from data specific to each region, NERA’s reports contain the same legal reviews, conclusions and recommendations for government agencies from Florida to Missouri” (a reference to the NERA Team’s study for the Missouri Department of Transportation).
The Plain Dealer Editorial Board wrote on February 23, “Rather than conduct new surveys, the firm relied on data gathered from minority and women business owners for a 2010 report commissioned – and separately paid for – by the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.”
Adolphus Pruitt is president of the St. Louis city chapter of the NAACP.
