Here’s a quick update on our news story this week about the first challenge to Portland’s Equal Benefits Ordinance:

King County, Washington has had an EBO in place since April of 2004, so I put in a call to them to see how many waivers to the policy they give out. According to their procurement office, in the year 2005, they had 872 compliance forms (that’s how many contracts over $25,000 were signed), and 78 waivers given out—for a total of nine percent. In other words, nearly one out of every ten contracts that go through the county are exempted from the Equal Benefits law.

By comparison, for the first eight months that Portland’s EBO has been in existence, there’s been only one successful request for a waiver—from Qwest. It’s difficult to judge how representative that will be of the future, since every contract that was currently alive when the EBO went into effect has been grandfathered in. The real test will be in the coming year, as new contracts come up and old ones are brought up for renewal.