While St. Louis aldermen deliberate on the $1 billion NFL stadium deal, another city agency is already $1 billion deep into a $4.7-billion construction project.
Remember in 2007 when the Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) was sued by the state and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) because untreated sewage was flowing into the Mississippi River? A settlement agreement then required MSD to spend $4.7 billion over the next 23 years to eradicate over 350 sewer overflows.
In order to get through the first phase, MSD asked St. Louis city and county voters to pass a $945 million bond issue in 2012 – which they did. The district touted that the first $1.6 billion phase would create more than 25,500 jobs over the next four years, according to an MSD-commissioned impact study.
We are now three years down the road, and community leaders are trying to understand where MSD is at with those expected jobs and how many are going to minorities and local residents.
These are the same community leaders that on October 10, 2013 successfully got MSD’s Board of Trustees to approve a Community Benefits Agreement, which required MSD to adopt minority workforce goals (they never had them previously) and to put about $300,000 annually into construction training programs and minority recruitment.
At a December 14 stakeholders meeting, MSD executive director Brian Hoelscher and his staff presented a breakdown of jobs and other aspects of the agreement. For fiscal year 2015, about 224 full-time employees (not 25,000) have been working on the building and non-building constructions jobs. Of those, 58 were minority workers. Those numbers were derived from calculating the total workforce hours rather than actual bodies on jobs.
If the district wanted to meet the minority workforce goal of 30 percent, then they need to hire nine more full-time minorities.
And these numbers only reflect fiscal year 2015, which includes about $227 million in contracts, said MSD spokesman Lance LeComb.
LeComb said that they didn’t have the resources to track workforce on the rest of the $1 billion. Previously they only had one person, Vicki Taylor Edwards, to handle the district’s entire diversity program. After MSD established new goals (based on a disparity study completed in 2013), then they hired Shonnah Paredes to manage the diversity programs. They now have a team of about eight, along with a few people from Kwame Building Group, which acts as the third-party monitor.
In 30 to 60 days, MSD hopes to have their new computer tracking system up and running. LeComb said that system will be able to get a total picture of workforce for the full $1 billion. But even then, it will probably not be fully accurate because no one was in charge of tracking it until Paredes came on in spring 2013, he said.
In fact, the numbers that were produced for the meeting were all done by hand in Microsoft Excel, and they were burning the midnight oil to get them to the signatories by the time of the meeting, LeComb said.
Yaphett El-Amin, executive director of the minority business advocacy group MOKAN, questioned why they still didn’t have an effective tracking system for diversity.
“They wouldn’t allow the engineering system to go for over a year and not be functional in reporting the structural issues with a project,” she said. “Why is it allowed for the diversity system not to be in place for so long?”
Still battling
For the past year, community leaders and Hoelscher have been in a heated battle. Three MSD trustees who attended the December 14 meeting said they are finally beginning to realize how deep these feelings run.
At a December 4 meeting, community leaders presented several concerns with the diversity program (which we’ll get to later), and the December 14 meeting was MSD’s chance to respond to them.
In the beginning of the meeting, Hoelscher called the CBA meetings dysfunctional. And in his closing remarks, Hoelscher said that some of questions raised by community leaders these past nine months – and the way they were raised – did “nothing but waste ratepayer resources.” He specifically pointed to those questions about MSD’s change order process and inappropriate comments made by an investigator about minority workers.
Two of the trustees seemed to look past Hoelscher’s antagonistic remarks and went straight over to El-Amin after the meeting to explain that they wanted to look deeper into their concerns.
“The CBA brought forth some information that was different from what we had seen through MSD,” James Faul, board vice chair, told The St. Louis American after the meeting. “MSD brought information today that we were seeing for the first time as well. I have questions about the program, procedures and places where the accusation and response are not adding up still.”
Trustee Ruby Bonner said the board intends to have a meeting to take a deeper look at the recommendations of the CBA signatories.
“That is one of the board concerns – how can we best continue the community-based organization and administrators to work together,” she said.
Are minorities getting jobs?
Until the December 14 meeting, Hoelscher and his staff failed to respond to repeated requests for the number of people who were employed on MSD jobs under the BUD job training program (to which MSD contributes $150,000 annually) or from a $150,000 annual contract with the St. Louis Agency for Training and Employment (SLATE) to recruit minorities.
They finally provided that information Monday. There are 30 people currently listed on SLATE’s First-Source Hiring list – and none of them have landed jobs on MSD projects. MSD sponsored 16 people in the BUD program and 13 have found jobs – but none at MSD.
Early this spring, community leaders criticized MSD for defaulting on the agreement. Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis branch of the NAACP, wrote Hoelscher in May saying that he implemented a policy in 2013 that allowed contractors to keep their “all-white crews.” That policy negated the extensive work that some MSD board members and the community leaders had put forth to establish the current minority participation goals. Those goals were set in stone after the district completed a disparity study in spring 2013.
At the meeting on December 14, Hoelscher’s acknowledgment of the act was quick, but he did say he allowed contractors to not diversify their crews “for safety reasons.”
His said his decision had to do with “concern about the dangers inherent to any sewer construction site and how the immediate replacement of three or four individuals of an existing full-time five person crew could make this work environment even more dangerous,” he said.
In a meeting with The St. Louis American in September, Hoelscher said the policy was established by word of mouth only. He also did not explain to community leaders that he made this change to the agreement. Pruitt and others found about the policy later and started raising their concerns in the winter of 2014. The provision was officially put to a stop in August 2015.
The community leaders have also since been trying to get a picture of workforce participation, and as LeComb mentioned, MSD still can’t provide it in full.
After the December 14 meeting, El-Amin said, “I am concerned by the tone and tenor of the director, in response to our organization trying to ensure that the ratepayers’ dollars that are spent with these publicly subsidized projects are spent and allowed for qualified minority and women workers to participate.”
