Thank you to Jeremy Thompson of Economic Justice Research Hub, LLC for sending us this article!
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More than a decade after Los Angeles started trying to sidestep California’s affirmative action ban, firms owned by white men won 92 percent of the $2.1 billion in contracts awarded by the city, though they’re just 14 percent of the population.
A diversity program in place since 2001 has had little impact because it’s rarely enforced, according to critics and city officials. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, elected in 2005, has called it “absolutely insufficient.” A compliance scorecard for 2012 detailed how the second-most populous U.S. city fell short of its own goals for bringing female and minority contractors to 22 percent.
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| Los Angeles started its outreach program in 2001, four years before Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat and the first Hispanic mayor since 1872, took office. Photographer: Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg |
The struggle to shake up the status quo in Los Angeles -- which has the second-highest share of minority residents of the 10 largest cities, at about 71 percent -- underscores the power of prohibitions against preferences for women and traditional minority groups.
With 1996’s Proposition 209, California became the first state to outlaw gender and race preferences, inspiring bans in Washington, Michigan, Nebraska and Arizona. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering Michigan’s law in a college case that may affect state prohibitions against factoring in race and ethnicity in hiring, contracting and university admissions.
In Los Angeles, the city hasn’t been aggressive enough in finding ways around state law, said Tim Lohrentz, who has studied contracting for the Insight Center for Community Economic Development in Oakland, California.
‘Really Varied’
While “Los Angeles has in some ways a really innovative policy,” Lohrentz said, “at the implementation level, it’s really varied and not very well done.”There is no national census of contractors broken down by race, ethnicity or gender, according to the National Association of Minority Contractors.
The city requires agencies to set diversity goals and their main contractors to document good-faith efforts to reach out to nonwhite, non-male subcontractors.
“We laughingly call it the ‘good-fake’ effort,” said Beverly Kuykendall, an African-American who owns a consulting business and is on the board of the Southern California chapter of the National Association of Minority Contractors.
Los Angeles has to force the hands of companies that win the biggest jobs, Kuykendall said. “Only if there’s a pain point will some of these prime contractors make an effort.”
About 100 miles to the south, San Diego, with a non-Hispanic white population of 45 percent, has achieved results by mandating that a certain amount of contract work go to small businesses. The system has pulled in women and minorities without creating a bureaucracy that targets them directly. Lohrentz called it “very simple” and easy to police.
To give the Los Angeles program some teeth, Villaraigosa in January opened a $400,000-a-year Office of Contractor Relations. The outreach program had operated until then without a city agency designated to manage and enforce it.
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