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Friday, April 8, 2011

News PDC Did Not Employ As Many Minority and Women-Owned Businesses as it Should Have

Posted by Sarah Mirk on Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 3:59 PM

Draft reports of two major studies released today shine light on how the City and Portland Development Commission (PDC) award construction contracts. The studies show that while the City does a solid job of employing women and minority-owned businesses, the PDC falls short and does not work with as many women and minority-owned businesses as it could.

Both the PDC and the City are responsible for hiring construction companies for millions of dollars in projects annually—everything from pouring the cement for bioswales to building new affordable housing. And both the PDC and City have policies mandating that they commit to hiring women and minority-owned businesses, since the vast majority of contracts have historically gone to white-male-owned companies. In 2009, Mayor Adams tasked Housing Commissioner Nick Fish with looking into hiring rates and his office paid a Denver-based firm

The Bud Clark Commons (which I just toured yesterday) was a city and PDC-funded project that awarded 18% of its construction dollars to women and minority-owned businesses.
  • The Bud Clark Commons (which I just toured yesterday) was a city and PDC-funded project that awarded 18% of its construction dollars to women and minority-owned businesses.
The studies looked at 9,000 contracts issued or sponsored by the City or PDC between 2004 and 2009 and compared the availability of services offered by minority or women-owned businesses to the rate at which the groups actually employed on public contracts.

Or, because I rarely understand economics when it's not in the form of food metaphors: How much of the construction-money pie should be going to minority and women-owned businesses? And how much is actually going to them?

The City got good marks: On its contracts, women and minority-owned businesses got more of the pie than expected given the number of those businesses available. But the PDC's contracts had a significant disparity: Minority and women-owned businesses were employed less often than expected. Check out a snapshot of the results below the cut.

First, the City's stats.
MBE = Minority-owned business
WBE = Women-owned business

Picture_7.png

And the PDC figures:
Picture_6.png

Download the PDC study here and the City study here.

 

Comments (1) RSS

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Yeah! -- let's send that Portland money to out of town consultants.

Wait, instead. let's spend that money to build a LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems).

Oh never mind we already have MercPerk$.
Posted by Rosy on April 9, 2011 at 12:14 PM · Report

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