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Contractors Unite
In New Haven, hopes that strength in numbers, and in purpose, can begin to redress past injustice
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Business New Haven
6/1/1998
By: Elizabeth Guertin Regan
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With $600 million in construction projects planned in the next five years, the city of New Haven is taking steps to assure that everyone gets a piece of the pie.
A Regional Contractors' Alliance is being assembled to help empower female and minority contractors to increase their participation in the local building industry. The alliance is one of six recommendations of Mayor John DeStefano Jr.'s Ad Hoc Committee to Assist Minority- and Women-Owned Firms. It will include not only minority- and women-owned firms, but larger contractors, developers and some of the area's largest users of contractors including Yale University, the Hospital of Saint Raphael and Bayer Corp.
The Ad Hoc Committee was created in March 1997 in the wake of the expiration of the city's set-aside ordinance that reserved a percentage of project funds to be awarded to minority- or women-owned firms. When the ordinance, known as Section 12*, expired in 1994, the city was embroiled in a reverse-discrimination lawsuit that challenged the legality of set-asides.
According to mayoral spokesman Michael Kuczkowski, Section 12* would not likely have held up in court “without detailed historical evidence that there had been discrimination in the years before the ordinance was established.”
The lawsuit was dropped when the ordinance was not renewed. The city stopped certifying minority- and women-owned firms, and anecdotal evidence indicates that “the number of women and minority contractors getting city contracts plummeted,” Kuczkowski reports.
There are no hard and fast numbers to support that premise, or even to identify how many New Haven-area firms are owned by women or minorities and might be affected by the set-aside ordinance. The reporting system was woefully inadequate four years ago and has been essentially inactive since the ordinance expired.
The membership of the Ad Hoc Committee itself represents a remarkable step in trying to level the playing field, according to Alisa K. Bowens, owner of the general contracting firm Brushworks Unlimited. Bowens sat on the committee with Roger Vann of the Greater New Haven NAACP, Benedict Cozzi of the Greater New Haven Building Trades Council, city Development Administrator Walter Esdaile, aldermanic President Tomas Reyes and John Farnham, executive director of Associated General Contractors - one of the plaintiffs in the reverse-discrimination lawsuit.
The committee found that women and minority firms were being left out of the informal (read: “old boy”) network of contractors and subcontractors that submit bids for city projects. In addition, according to Bowens, minorities in the community were less likely to be employed by larger contractors than by small, minority-owned firms: “The larger contractors were building right here in the community, and not affording people who lived in the community any employment opportunities,” she says.
Bowens contends that smaller firms, though capable of doing the work, are unprepared for the bid process, which typically involves a great deal of time estimating labor and cost of materials.
Since founding her company in 1993, Bowens has learned the ins and outs herself through programs of the U.S. Small Business Administration, where she now speaks at seminars on the topic of set-asides.
The Regional Contractors' Alliance will establish a bid information center where contractors can access the paperwork they need and ask questions. There will be educational opportunities, as well as assistance with financing and bonding. In addition, there will be networking opportunities.
“The reliability of subcontractors is definitely in the best interest of larger contractors,” Kuczkowski asserts, thus encouraging their participation. Plus, he adds, “It makes them look better to keep the dollars in the local area.”
The alliance will begin organizing this month and is laying the groundwork for funding, with the City kicking in $50,000 for administrative costs. The Ad Hoc Committee's other recommendations will begin to take shape in the next six months, as well, including:
• A Business Opportunity Ordinance that establishes incentives for employing women or minority contractors will likely be approved by the end of the year.
• The Commission on Equal Opportunities will receive $87,500 to make improvements to its computer systems and establish a new method of monitoring minority- and women-owned firms, as well as contract awards. The money is long overdue, according to both Bowens and Esdaile. “As a contractor, I want those things tracked,” Bowens says. “I want a reporting of the construction revenue, so we have to give them something to work with.”
• A system of funding whereby project owners help to pay for the cost of monitoring will be established in the coming months, as well.
• A task force to address workforce development will convene next month. “We need to sell construction as a job and a career,” Esdaile explains, rather than temporary employment. A strong apprenticeship program that offers increasing levels of skill and responsibility will lead to more and diverse workers rising through the ranks to eventually own their own companies. “It gives individuals greater opportunity to be successful,” Esdaile asserts.
• Finally, a $105,000 “disparity study” will be completed by the end of the year. The study will examine the city's history of discrimination in the building industry for two reasons: to determine a benchmark for measuring the success of these initiatives; and to determine if there is basis for a legally defensible set-aside ordinance.
“There was strong feeling among the committee members,” Esdaile explains,” to have both a carrot and a stick.”
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