Minority participation goals do the same for the St. Louis business community as medication for a high-blood pressure patient, said Abe Adewale, co-founder and CEO of the ABNA Engineering, at the Feb. 25 public forum to discuss the Metropolitan Sewer District’s recent disparity study.
If the district takes away minority hiring goals for professional services, the dollars that black engineers earn from MSD contracts will fall, Adewale said to the 200-plus MSD forum attendees at St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley.
“All of the sudden, the doctor recommends to the patient, ‘You’re feeling good. You don’t have to use your medication anymore,’” said Adewale, who was representing the National Society of Black Engineers. “The program has been working thus far. This is not the time to basically throw it out.”
The disparity study released on Feb. 15 found that MSD had not been employing as many African-American subcontractors as they could have on construction contracts in past years. However, among professional service subcontracts, the study found no evidence of disparity.
Hence, Mason Tillman Associates, the consultant agency that conducted the study, recommended that MSD eliminate the district’s current goal of a combined 30 percent for minority- and women-owned businesses on professional services. Without statistical data to support this goal, MSD could be challenged in court, the agency stated.
In the last two years, MSD awarded 51 engineering professional services subcontracts. About 37 percent of the $2.5 million in subcontracts went to African-American-owned companies. Yet for prime engineering contracts more than $500,000, African-American-owned businesses earned 8.5 percent of the $90.7 million in contracts.
Adewale’s concern is valid, said Eleanor Mason Ramsey, president of Mason Tillman. Ramsey has studied several agencies with aggressive inclusion programs and found no disparities in their practices. The catch 22 is that without proof of disparity, the agency cannot legally justify the very minority participation goals that helped them to eliminate disparity. So they have to remove the goals or become vulnerable to a lawsuit.
“In most of those communities, probably without exception, the use plummeted once the goals were removed,” she said. “That’s one thing this community might anticipate.”
St. Louis could be immune to plummeting minority participation if prime contractors consistently hire minority businesses on all projects – even when not required, she said. That would be a good way to tell if the elimination of goals would affect minority subcontractors, she said, but that wasn’t reviewed in the study.
Vicki Taylor Edwards, director of human resources for MSD, said that all stakeholders, including the black engineers, agreed that the district would implement the study’s recommendations.
“For me, it’s very difficult,” she said. “It does not make me sleep well at night. We had a roundtable of different advocates, and we all said we would live with whatever comes out of the study.”
The urgency to review MSD’s inclusion program came from the $4.7 billion in mandated improvements the district will be making over the next 23 years.
Mason Tillman also recommended several policy changes that would provide support for small businesses in landing MSD contracts through payment tracking, loan and bonding support, and increasing MSD’s inclusion team, among other policies.
Workforce goals by trade
At the forum, several labor union leaders urged the district to look at workforce goals in terms of trades, rather than overall.
The study recommends a 30-percent workforce goal for minorities and seven percent goal for women in construction contracts more than $500,000. This is higher than the hotly debated interim workforce goals of 25 percent minority and 6.9 percent women for construction contracts.
Gary Elliott, business manager for the Eastern Missouri Labor District Council, said that without enforcing this goal by trade, the inclusion program would only go so far to diversify the workforce. Most likely, prime contractors would look to laborers and carpenters to fill their workforce requirements, and that would not help to diversity electricians, pipefitters and other trades, he said.
Currently, the district does require its workforce goals to be met by trade, according to its interim policy passed in March 2012. Last year, Adolphus Pruitt, president of the NAACP, pushed the district to adopt the federal workforce guidelines, which are enforced by trade.
After the interim policy was passed, Pruitt said, “This policy is going to force those contractors and unions who are operating in those areas to now diversify some trade areas that have been ignored for a very long time.”
Mason Tillman did not make the recommendation to look at workforce goals by trade. However, Ramsey told Elliot his concerns were heard, and the district would take them into account. If MSD receives federal funds, the district would have to abide by federal guidelines and diversify by trade, Pruitt said.
For professional services, the workforce goal recommended is 18 percent minorities and 32 percent women, and the interim goals were a combined 30 percent goal for both women and minorities.
“It’s obvious that you’ve been able to find some folks that a lot of folks say don’t exist in the numbers,” Pruitt said. “We appreciate the fact that MSD did move forward to quantify the discussion as it relates to MBE participation.”
