In business session, our first item is approval of minutes for business session for March 5th.

Is there a motion?

Oh move.

Second.

We moved and seconded.

All in favor of approving the item for March 5th, indicated by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

All opposed.

Motion passes.

We will now hear disparity study presentation.

The director of CREO.

We'd love to hear from you.

Good afternoon, Mayor, City Manager and Council.

I want to thank you for giving us his opportunity to present the final.

Our final discretion study for 2026.

With me today, I have Alvaro and Tiveros, our division manager for certification, as well as two representatives from Griffin and Strong.

And I will let you all introduce yourselves.

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Courtney Clark.

I am the project manager on the disparity study.

Yes, good afternoon.

I'm Michelle Clark Jenkins.

I'm the director of methodology and research for Griffin and Strong.

Today, our goal is to uh provide the information, the recommendations and the findings.

Before we get into the actual presentation, I do want to turn it over to Alvaro here who will talk about our immediate next steps, which uh is our committee engagement plan.

Good afternoon, mayors, uh city manager and city council members.

My name is Albert One Taveros.

I am the business certification division manager for the City Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity Department, and I'd like to present to you with a brief timeline of what our next steps are.

So today, May 14th, you will hear the presentation of the completed disparity study.

Following this afternoon session, the executive summary and the disparity study in its full version will be posted on CRIO's website at KCMO.gov slash CRIO.

Tomorrow morning, we'll begin our 45 day public comment period, which will close on June 29th, as well as the registration will open for our upcoming community engagement events so that we can gather feedback, answer questions, and hear from our engaged stakeholders.

The community engagement sessions uh are as follows.

There will be three.

There are currently three community engagement sessions scheduled beginning May 27th in the evening at the Southeast Community Center.

Followed the next week at June 3rd, 6 p.m.

at Northland Neighborhoods Incorporated.

And our final community engagement session will be a virtual session on June 10th at 10 a.m.

And if there are any questions, I will gladly answer them.

We also on our website we're gonna open a speake page that allows people to uh submit comments uh to us.

Uh we're also gonna be um keeping a FAQ uh section on there.

Uh with that, I will turn it over to the Griffin and Strong team.

Thank you, Director.

Um, and thank you to the city for selecting Griffin and Strong to complete the study.

It's been great to work with everyone in the city.

I know we've um had a lot of asks, so thank you to the folks at Creo especially for for helping us get this study in.

Really excited to be here today and present um our findings and recommendations for you all.

I would like to acknowledge um one team member who worked on this study, Mrs.

Carrie Stapleton.

Um Griffin and Strong work with her with Phillips and West as the PR subcontractor through the study, and we were really sad to hear the news of her passing.

So I'd like to offer our sincerest condolences to the city and to everyone who knew and loved her before we begin the presentation.

Um we did prepare a presentation for you all.

Um we'll learn a little bit about Griffin and Strong.

We'll discuss the objective of the study and the methodology.

We'll then discuss the parameters and the relevant market used for the study, and then we'll discuss the findings, statistical findings.

We'll discuss some commendations and recommendations, and then we'll discuss next steps from here, and we'll have some time for question and answer.

So, Griffin and Strong, we are a public policy and consulting firm based out of Atlanta, Georgia.

We specialize in procurement research, compliance, supplier diversity consulting, and contract compliance.

We do have a very qualified team, one of the most qualified team in the industries with six JDs, a PhD in economics, social psychology, anthropology, as well as in history.

Our project executive on this study and our CEO of Griffin and Strong, Mr.

Rodney K.

Strong, has unmatched expertise.

He served as the director of the City of Atlanta's Department of Contract Compliance, and he was project manager of the first post-crocen disparity study and was the principal architect of the City of Atlanta's Distinguished Equal Business Opportunity Program and served as an expert witness in two different cases.

Our senior economist, Dr.

Gregory Price on the study.

He has 25 years of experience in economic analysis and discrepancies in employment in the private sector and was named as one of the top 40 black economists in the last 30 years.

So for those who may not who may not be familiar with the disparity studies, disparity studies are an objective research tool, which is used to determine if there are disparities in an agency's procurement practices and whether those exist within certain race or ethnic or gender groups across different industry categories.

It then determines whether those disparities are statistically significant and whether they are attributable to the race and gender of the firm owners.

Disparity studies have many different methods of analysis, but some of those are anecdotal analysis as well as a policy analysis to fully examine the agencies' policies and procedures and to get insights from the business community.

And then from our analyses, we then present recommendations and best practices, which must be narrowly tailored to fit the findings of the outcome of the study.

Our methodology for the study consisted of 10 different components.

We first began with a legal analysis, which did a deep dive into the prevailing law governing disparity studies, specifically the Crowson case, and we also discussed additional cases as well as the prevailing case in the Eighth Circuit, which is where Kansas City is situated.

We then did a full policy analysis.

We did policy interviews to determine how the policy is acted in practice.

So that involved policy interviews with folks in CREO, EDCKC, the law department, and more, as well as reviewing the city's code of ordinances and the purchasing procedures manual.

From there, we collected a lot of data and cleaned the data.

So we had seven years worth of payment data and many other data sets that we collected as part of this analysis, which then was used to create our relevant market for the study.

The relevant market was used by the payment data where we determined where the city spent most of its dollars.

From there, we did a utilization analysis, which examined the percentage and a number of firms that were being utilized in comparison to the data we received.

And then we did an availability analysis, which determined the amount of available firms in the Kansas City MSA.

Those two compared together is what creates the disparity analysis, and that's where we start to see some findings really emerge from the numbers.

The private sector analysis is another component that was completed.

This was done to determine if there are any barriers that we may not see in the agency's procurement policies or practices.

If there are things in the private sector that might be contributing to businesses entering the public procurement space.

Sometimes numbers can say one thing and the community might say another.

So as part of this analysis, we had many different outreach events that we did.

We had four community engagement sessions.

This is kind of like a public hearing where we invited business owners to share testimony about their experience doing business with the city, maybe reasons why they haven't done business, if there's anything that they would like to see improved.

We collected all of their insights in the these sessions.

We also did 60 different anecdotal one-on-one interviews to hear insights that way.

And then we also met with the organizations in the community, those who work with the business owners every day.

We had five different organizational meetings as part of this study.

We also did focus groups.

Those are more targeted sessions where we discussed um specific topics with business owners across different ethnic categories as well all of these items compiled together is what we put in our final report and that's how we offered our recommendations and our findings so that was the methodology and the process for for our disparity study the parameters for this study and what we looked at is the study period from May 1st 2015 through April 30th 2022 which is also the city's fiscal years of 2016 to 2022 we looked at five different industry categories of construction architecture and engineering professional services other services and goods and supplies okay so um the first analysis we did was to determine what's the geographic area that we're studying and so we do that as Courtney mentioned utilizing your payment data so where is the city already spending the overwhelming majority of its dollars already so we started with the city itself looked at firms who had a location in the city and then radiated out until we got to um to over or somewhere approximating 75% we kind of borrow from antitrust law in terms of depending determining where marketplace is so we looked at uh crossing that threshold of 75% so the good news is that the majority again overwhelming majority of the city's dollars are being spent right here in your MSA so relatively locally so 99% of all of your construction dollars are being spent with firms who have a location in your MSA.

93.71% of your dollars are spent with architecture and engineering firms here 93.81% professional services 86.94% and other services and 77.16% of goods and supplies I will comment that that goods and supplies is a huge number to be spent locally because most jurisdictions we see that's a much lower number because people buy their goods and supplies kind of all over the world and definitely now they're buying online and a lot of other places so that's a really good number I think this that's really good news we have seen other places where that has become the headline the next day that all your money is going outside of your MSA.

This can be your headline that your money is being spent locally and overall it was about 92 93% overall being spent in the MSA.

So I'm going to start with kind of the end first which is what did we ultimately recommend to you and then we'll start to build up in terms of what supported that again the good news is that your MWBE programs have been successful.

You have had a substantial amount of participation the other side of that is that when we see as much participation as you've had you don't withstand sometimes the um the requirements of Crocin to continue a race and gender conscious program.

So there are some areas and and there are some choices that the city will have to make if you were to continue your present MWBE program with race and gender conscious goals this list that you're seeing would tell you who could participate in that based on the data so in construction, none of the minority or women groups could participate in a race and gender conscious program.

In architecture and engineering, only Asian American, Islamic American, Native American, and women owned firms could participate.

In professional services, African American, Asian American, and Native American owned firms.

In other services no none of the MWBE groups could participate.

And in goods and supplies, Asian American and Hispanic American owned firms.

So again, the city could proceed with its current programs, but only with regard to those groups that I named.

So our recommendation, rather than having a spotty program, which in essence what you wind up having having, and then what happens is over time, for example, if there's one only, you know, two of the minority groups can participate, then what happens is you have a goal-based program when you put goals on your contracts, then the other groups who can't be included wind up flatlining.

So the next time you do a disparity study, you'll find that you flipped, that you've got these groups who were underutilized who are now going to be overutilized, and these groups who cannot participate are now flatlined because of the program.

There's no program for them.

So what we suggest is that to mitigate both the legal and kind of the administrative hardships of trying to administer just a kind of spotty MWB program is that you consider transitioning away from a race and gender conscious program and instead having a race and gender neutral program and instead of having MWBE goals have SBE or SLBE goals.

We did find that the majority of your certified, at least currently certified SLBEs, are in fact minorities and women.

So if the goal is let's maintain or make sure that we've got the appropriate participation of minority and women owned firms, then you can do that and still get to the same place, we believe, with a race and gender neutral program.

And this is pretty much across all your industries.

So I start thought I would start with the big picture because I know the city has had a race and gender conscious program for decades, and so this would be a big transition.

We're not underestimating that to go from a race and gender conscious program to a race and gender neutral program.

But again, with the goal in mind that you want to get participation from all demographics, this would still, we believe this would still get you there.

You've obviously had a very successful program to date.

You probably have trained your prime contractors that if they're going to do work with Kansas City that you want to see participation.

So again, at least for this study, we're seeing that that's been a successful process.

Next slide, please.

So to go back and give you the support for the data for our outcomes.

This slide shows the prime utilization.

So we did several analysis.

The prime utilization is who did the city directly contract with?

And so these dollars demonstrate broken down by each of the industry categories.

We've got a total, you'll see of 5.8 billion all the way to the right.

So if you look at these dollars broken down, MWBEs got about 15, 15 and a half percent in construction.

That was broken down as 9.27% to MBEs, 6.21% to WBEs.

In AE, you've got 3.5% to MBEs, about 3% to WBEs.

In professional services, it's a much smaller number, 0.35% in professional services, 0.66, so about 1% in both of those areas.

And then in other services, 1.36% MBE, about a half of a percent with WBEs.

And in goods and supplies, 0.27%, MBE, 1.91%, WBE.

So there's a total across the board of 3.74%, MBE and 2.82% WBE.

So that's prime, those are your direct contracts.

So then what we did is we did what's called a total utilization.

So that added in all your subcontractors.

So for example, if you had a non-minority prime who had a million-dollar contract, in a prime analysis, we would have put that whole one million dollars into the non-minority category.

With a total utilization, if that non-minority prime subcontracted out $100,000 to an African American owned firm, then $100,000 to a woman-owned firm.

Left $800,000 in the non-minority category, moved $100,000 to the African American category, and $100,000 to the women category.

So this takes a bigger snapshot of where did those dollars end up ultimately.

So when we did this total utilization analysis, you've got 17% in construction, 17.52% went to MBEs, 10.20.

Now remember, this is prime plus sub.

So 10.20% went to WBEs.

In AE, 16.34% went to MBE's 13.39% to WBEs.

In professional services, 5.29% to MBEs, 5.45% to WBEs.

In other services, 4.82% to MBEs 2.14% to WBEs.

And then in goods and supplies, 2.77 to MBEs, 3.67 to WBEs, and then total about 10% went to MBE's 7.02% to WBEs.

So that's our utilization using payment dollars.

So what was actually paid out to firms located in the relevant market, which is your MSA.

So then we did a disparity analysis that compared utilization to availability.

Where you see X's is where you see underutilization.

Where you see a star or a P, so P is parity, which means they're right where they're supposed to be.

Where you see an asterisk is that there was a slight underutilization, but it was not statistically significant.

We can only include in a program those firms that have those X's.

So again, this is prime utilization.

So in construction, African American owned firms were slightly underutilized, but it was within the margin, so that it could not count as statistically significant.

Asian American owned firms were on parity, and women-owned firms were slightly underutilized, but it was in the margin.

So we know that's the area where there's a lot of spend and a lot of particularly goals.

So then we did the same thing.

Do you want to go to the next slide?

Total utilization, and it looks a little bit different.

If you look at construction, where you see those blanks means there was overutilization.

It means that your utilization exceeds your availability percentages.

So Asian American, you know, there's an asterisk, that means Asian American and as well as non-minority owned firms were slightly underutilized, but not with still within the margin.

So across the board you'll see that there are a lot of blanks there, and that means there was overutilization.

We also did, we looked at size, so we controlled for size.

So a lot of times we hear disparity study really looks at all dollars, but then we also looked at smaller contracts.

So we took out the large over a million dollar contracts to say, is there still a disparity?

And then we took out all the contracts over half million where capacity is not an issue.

The idea is that if it's a contract under a half million, that even small firms could perform on those.

So we looked at whether there are disparities there, wasn't much of a difference.

It's pretty much dispair this disparities or the overutilization we found were the same regardless of the size.

So then we looked at your SLBE utilization or your SLBE total utilization disparities.

And if you'll notice there's underutilization of SLBEs in construction, AE, professional services, and goods and supplies.

So what that's saying is that there are some places to go to increase utilization of SLBE firms.

And again, this is comparing SLBs, this is not a race and gender comparison.

This is large firms compared to these smaller local firms, and what we're seeing is that you could be utilizing your SLBEs a lot more.

So again, that's another reason for maybe transitioning to an SLBE program.

So I'll move on to commendations.

We saw a lot of those.

You all have a very good program that has been very successful, both in your race and gender conscious efforts as well as your race and gender neutral efforts.

So one of them is that you have a small local business enterprise program that's sheltered market.

That is a great program to be able to allow smaller firms to only compete against each other rather than having to compete against a lot of larger firms.

And so we really do commend you for having that program.

Your vendor rotation program.

We're not a big fan of what's called on call contracts, these contracts where you can basically uh put task orders under them.

You have had a really comprehensive vendor rotation program so that there's been an effort to make sure that if you have firms in a pool that that pool is actually rotated.

So it's not the same firms getting the same work at the same level and the other firms not getting a lot of work.

So we commend you on having an equitable or as equitable as possible vendor rotation plan.

Then for insurance and bond uh coverage, um, it's great that you have that you don't require this until the work actually begins.

A lot of jurisdictions that we work with require you to demonstrate all of that before you've even won a project or before you start work.

So that's a really good policy.

We'll be stealing a couple of your policies to recommend to other places.

Also, we tend to get a lot of complaints about insurance and bond coverage.

We did not get a lot of complaints from the community when we talked to them through our anecdotal evidence about insurance and bond coverage.

So that's a good that's a good sign too.

Joint ventures, um, I will talk about joint ventures in our recommendations, but you're commended for encouraging joint ventures.

That is a great way to grow the capacity of your local firms, and getting more getting firms to grow larger in your marketplace.

We commend you for your economic and business development programs.

Uh there were a number of them, your industrial development bonds, the TIFF program, and all of the things that you do to support business growth.

There are some model programs actually that you have here.

Uh, the CREO assurance addendum, we're stealing this one, because you have a you outline and particularly make sure that firms are well aware of of the city's policy that outlines their non-discrimination policy as well as supporting equity in contracting.

So we commend you on that.

We do, however, have some recommendations about how things could be modified to have a more equitable, but also what we find is that sometimes it's just having effective policies, more effective policies that the more effective your policies are, the more streamlined they are, then that also allows more participation of firms.

So we do recommend emphasizing a non-discrimination policy and possibly making some tweaks to that.

And we did hear through anecdotal evidence that there were some accounts of perceived discrimination on city projects.

Although I will tell you that we asked the question whether you perceive discrimination from the city, and then we also asked whether you perceive discrimination in the marketplace, and the marketplace perception was greater than what they perceive from the city.

So if that's any kind of a measurement, but we did hear a little bit about uh perceived discrimination.

Um the city does have a legal requirement not to be a passive participant in the any active discrimination of its primes.

So it is important, even if as you transition to a race and gender neutral program, that you emphasize your non-discrimination policy, and where you see the possibilities of discrimination happening, that you do investigations, that you ask for more documents, and your non-discrimination policy is really your authority to ask more questions if you see your prime contractors continuing, particularly when you know there's availability.

Let's say you know there's a lot of availability of hauling companies, which we know that tends to be the case, but yet you have primes who never use any diverse firms in hauling.

That might open the door to some conversations.

We also recommend that you require at least one quote in your informal solicitations.

It's a good idea that where you have requirement to get three quotes that at least one of those quotes be from a small minority or women-owned firm.

Also, unbundling contracts.

You have some very large contracts, and so we know that from an administrative standpoint, it is easier to have large contracts, but by unbundling them allows more firms to have more opportunities, particularly your local small businesses.

I'll give you a good example.

The city of Toledo, Ohio, used to do one big mowing contract across the city.

About two years ago, three years ago, they decided, and that's obviously a lot easier to administer.

They decided to break up the city uh geographically and award a lot of small mowing contracts across the cities.

It was, it was very well received because a lot of small businesses got those contracts around the city, and then of course it gave them a lot of cachet with the businesses in town, and it was so successful that they're now looking for other areas like that where they could begin to unbundle their contracts.

So that's what we're recommending is just a review of these, particularly these very, you have some very large contracts, and a number of them, and I will tell you that it was an unusual amount of very large contracts, uh, both percentage-wise and number-wise.

Um, also that you accept reciprocal certification at the moment.

There isn't an acceptance of reciprocal certification, and that doesn't mean that you can't ask more questions or have more requirements, but it keeps firms from having to certify with the state, certify within with a county, certify here and certify there.

It allows them to put in a certification and then come to you with that certification.

As long as it's from another government agency and it's bona fide, that doesn't mean that you can't say, Well, on top of this, I want to do a site visit, or on top of this, I want to do so.

You can always add to that, but it keeps firms from having to resubmit on a regular basis to get certification, and initiate a targeted vendor registration campaign.

We did find that there were a number of firms who mentioned that registering with the city was either they didn't know there was a registration, or that they didn't know how to do it, or it was cumbersome.

So, and if you're switching to an SLBE program, we did see in our numbers when we looked in the survey that there are a number of firms who were certified as MBEs who probably could have also been certified as SLBEs, so you want to make sure you get them to come over and certify it.

And so it's a good idea to do a campaign and say the city's open to you know, uh doing business with small local businesses and to initiate that campaign.

We did get a number of comments about the uh administrative burdens and uh accessibility to being able to go through the procurement process.

We did hear about paperwork and excessive paperwork, particularly when it comes to sizes of contracts.

So the idea is that a million dollar contracts paperwork is not the same as a you know, hundred thousand dollar contracts, paperwork.

So to uh look to uh procure streamline your procurement processes as well as the paperwork.

We did hear an awful lot about the process being confusing, the procurement process, also forecasting.

So we heard a lot about, and by the way, this is not unusual, that the same people are getting the same contracts, and there's a good old boy network, and some people get information that nobody else has.

One way to shortcut that is to do forecasting, so that at least by the time the budget's been approved, you kind of know what you're what you're gonna be looking for in the coming year, and even though you're not putting out a solicitation, you can say these are the things coming up in the coming year.

18 months is great, but if you can do a year, that's that's good too, to say these are the opportunities.

Then you're not going to hear, well, these people over here who had access knew this was coming, but we didn't know about it until the last minute.

It also allows you, if you're doing forecasting, to do some target marketing, which is you don't have to wait for firms to come to you.

If you know there's a firm down the street who does the kind of work that you have upcoming, and they're not registered or certified with the city, there's nothing that stops the city from saying, Oh, you know, this is coming up, you might want to get yourself certified.

It also allows for teaming and those joint ventures we talked about to actually be real, rather than well, we only have eight weeks to try to put together a joint venture, and then review repeat awards for fairness.

Again, we heard same firms get contracts over and over and over again.

Our study does, if you want to look at it, there's a table in the full study that shows in each category who got what number of firms got those contracts.

So it's just something to review for fairness, um, lots of complaints about slow pay, both from primes and from subcontractors.

So we are recommending that you implement a prompt pay provision.

Um the lack of prompt pay can put a company under.

We know that that if it takes too long to pay them, and then they therefore are not paying their subs, that can be a domino effect to that really affects small businesses.

These term contracts that you have, we are recommending that you limit them to no more than three years, and with no more than two one year, two one-year renewal options.

It just is kind of by definition it kind of excludes other firms from participating.

If you have these long-term contracts, and nobody else can get in there, that eliminates new firms, it eliminates over time really minority, and there are some that we saw who had very long contracts because of the renewal options, and that just keeps competition out of the marketplace.

It means that hopefully probably means or may mean that the city's not getting the best price because where there's competition, hopefully there'll be better pricing to the city.

We do encourage you have an encouragement to joint venture.

You might reconsider making that a requirement for projects over five million.

City of Atlanta for 35 years has had a similar requirement.

Any construction project over $5 million must be a joint venture, and you must joint venture with someone who doesn't look like you.

And the growth of capacity in the city of Atlanta over the last 30 years has been modeled.

So it's something to consider.

Also require prime contractors to list all of the small minority and women-owned firms that they solicited for a subcontract.

One of the reasons for doing that is that sometimes you'll find that they solicited them, but then even if they were the lowest bidder, use somebody else.

So by having this requirement, one, it helps you to track who's out there and who's available to do work.

It also helps you to see whether there's been any, like why did if this firm who was a subcontractor submitted a bid that was the lowest, why did you not award it to them?

Also, there we did see some inconsistency with the contract thresholds between the manual and the ordinance.

When we looked, we did a deep dive in your policy.

It's one of the things we do because it's hard for us to make suggestions to you about how you could adjust your policies if we don't know them fairly well.

So one of the things we did was we looked at your ordinances as well as your manual, and there was some inconsistency there.

So we are suggesting there be an update to those.

Also, strengthen communication and transparency with the business community, including explanations for unsuccessful bidders.

That's a really great way to not only help firms to do better in their bidding, it's also a little bit of a PR effort because we hear from firms.

Listen, I submitted a bid, I didn't know whether I got the bid, whether I didn't get the bid, nobody told me why I didn't get it, and why should I even bid?

So a lot of times you'll see firms who actually drop out of the process because they don't understand why they're not they keep bidding and they don't get any award.

Well, it'd be helpful to let them know that.

So it'd be good to have some policies in that direction.

So data reform is I think one of the most important things we do because we go so deep in your data.

Your payment, we've looked at all of your payment data for seven years.

We've looked at your award data, your bidder data, your subcontractor data, and your vendor data.

And so we've looked at all of this knee deep.

And so there are some things that we have recommended, and I won't go into a lot of detail here, but it is are things that we think would be helpful because if the data, if we can't properly measure the data, or you're not maintaining the proper data, then some of your programs are for naught because you can't properly track them.

So we actually recommend that the data reform happen first, so that you can better track whatever it is that you wind up putting in place.

One of the things that we did have a problem with is uh joint venture data was really difficult for us to discern in the data that we were provided with.

So that would be helpful if those could be properly attributed.

Because joint venture data, we actually count joint venture data as we split it up based on the split with the joint ventures, but that's difficult to do if you don't know that if you don't have the joint venture agreements and know the splits between the joint ventures.

So next steps is to uh we finish reviewing and accept the study and its recommendations, conduct a gap analysis.

So what is it that you want to implement that doesn't need new authority and what is it that needs new authority?

There should be an implementation plan, like what steps, what phases, creating a new program plan and policy determine whether there needs to be more of a budget, does there need to be more staff to do some of the things we're talking about?

Actually, that should probably be the first thing, because if you don't have all the staff you need, then you may need to phase in some of what you're recommending and then ultimately uh do a training protocol and train staff.

And if you do a transition from race and gender conscious to race and gender neutral, that'll be really important.

Okay, so uh we're open to any questions you have.

Questions from Council Councilman Duncan.

Thank you, Albert Mayor.

Uh thank you for a very comprehensive and thorough study.

Uh the recommendations I find uh particularly interesting about unbundling contracts to increase access to smaller smaller firms.

Um I'm clear on why the recommendations to move from a race-based uh or where he's conscious uh program to a small to a small business uh based program, I understand the recommendation.

Um, so don't take my question wrong.

Um, the city of King City was chartered in 1850.

Uh 176 years.

There's been disparity for over a hundred years.

I don't I don't know how long we've had this program.

Just because we have parity in some avenues now, why do we have to rush to change the program?

Okay.

So 1989, there's a case called J.A.

Croson versus City of Richmond, Virginia.

And up until that time, there had been programs all around the country, really followed after after Nixon put in place the DBE program where so once the federal guidelines were met, everybody started putting in their local programs.

So this case, J.A.

Croson came before the court, and it was the first time that the court uh equated malevolent discrimination under the 14th Amendment with benevolent remediation of discrimination, basically put them on the same footing.

And at that time the court said that anything that deals with race and gender as a criteria now becomes looked at with a side eye.

In other words, it's it's it's tested at the highest judicial scrutiny, which is called strict scrutiny.

For anybody who's a lawyer, you know when you're in law school, they said strict in theory, fatal in fact.

So what happened is Justice O'Connor, who wrote the the majority opinion, left some room.

And said there, if we could demonstrate these disparities, that you could possibly maybe have these kind of programs.

You could find that out under the strict scrutiny requirements.

By the way, if you've never read Thurgood Marshall's dissent in that case, it's it's historic.

But in any event, we since 1989, uh the court at that point told us what we had to do how what we had to do, but didn't tell us how to do it.

So that's why disparity studies kind of became a thing, and we started demonstrating this.

The problem is that you have to have that factual predicate.

You have to have, under the 14th Amendment, you have to have a compelling government interest in order to override why you're not treating people equally.

So it's not rushing to do it.

What it's saying is you no longer have a factual predicate under the requirements of Crocen.

Now, Crowson followed by Adoran, 1989.

First, last time really the court has really opined about this.

Some of you have heard of students for fair admission, doesn't have anything to do with this, really, it doesn't.

If anything, it just confirmed the requirements of Crocen.

So to answer your question more directly, you just don't have a factual predicate, which makes the city more vulnerable in terms of not transitioning.

Now, what I will tell you is that you had some overutilization in prime contracting as well as in subcontracting.

And so to the extent that that prime contracting moves the needle, you might want to keep a lookout, because generally it's disparity studies are done every five years or so.

We didn't put this in our recommendations, but what you might want to do is keep an eye on what's happening in terms of your utilization.

Your availability is going to kind of stay where it is until you do your next study, but you might want to look at that utilization to make sure that needle doesn't change substantially, because that may reestablish a factual predicate for you.

But right now, those numbers don't bear up.

Thank you very much.

Councilman Robinson.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor, and thank you for your thorough presentation in getting this over the finish line.

I know that this is something that we have been talking about for a couple of years now, and I'm glad that we have this information so that we could make decisions based off of it.

Can you speak in your.

Yeah, so the hard part about that question, the answer to that question, is that there have been a number of municipalities who have through intimidation, and I'll say it isn't through intimidation, have moved to a race and gender neutral program, not because their disparity study showed that they should, but because of the lack of clarity about what illegal DEI means, which I'm happy to talk about at some point.

If anyone would like me to talk about that, but because they were unsure, there are lots of jurisdictions who in the past year have switched their MWB race and gender conscious programs to small business programs, not all, like I said, not always because of their disparity study outcomes.

So every municipality in Florida pretty much has done that.

So counties and cities in Florida, as well as, so I will tell you we did a study for Memphis for City of Memphis as well as Memphis, Shelby County Schools, City of Memphis paused its program, as well as Memphis Shelby County Schools transitioned to a what they called a small minority and women-owned program.

So that's been kind of I'm seeing that trend, which is to go to a small minority and women program, and so it includes minorities and women and small, but women a minority only if they're small.

So in essence, it's a small business program, but because by calling it a minority and women and small, they also continue to track and certify.

And so that's probably the trend I've seen in terms of how to transition.

By leaving MWB in the name of the program, also lets firms know that you're not going away from wanting to see minority and women participation, you're just going about it a different way, and that if they're small, you're still tracking, you're still encouraging, and you're still want to see that participation.

I know you didn't ask me this question, but I'm also going to add there are some places that have never been able, like it's in the constitution in both California and Washington State, that they can't have race and gender conscious programs.

So the city of Seattle, Washington, I think has had a really good way to, and they get participation.

What they've done is put in their special in the special language in their solicitations, they put the availability of minority and women-owned firms.

And then they say, here's the availability of women and minority-owned firms.

We want to, this is the level of participation we want to get to.

You tell us, Prime, how are you going to help us get there?

So it's a little more of a voluntary participation, and then if firms come in substantially under that availability, you still have the ability to test for whether there's been discrimination or whether, because if there's availability of 20% and yet nobody used anybody, I think that's an open that opens the door to say, why not?

Why wasn't there?

Sometimes uses it as a negotiating tool.

That the apparent winner, they'll say, What have you done to get more participation of minority and women-owned firms or small firms?

And they'll so as part of once the apparent there's an apparent winner, they'll sit down and really negotiate whether there's an ability to have more participation.

So again, it becomes more of a conversation, more of a negotiation, some more uh voluntary participation, but at the same time letting your primes know where your expectations are.

Okay.

And Mr.

Mayor, I do have a couple more questions, and just but in the interest of honoring my um colleagues' time, I would just like to ask them, and then if there are responses that you could get to us, that would be great.

First, as you know, and thank you for meeting um with folks, giving people an opportunity to meet um in advance of this discussion.

I'm very critical of this work because while I'm glad that we've gotten to this point, I want to make sure that we put the pedal to the battle as it relates to economic inclusion and ensuring our business all of our businesses thrive.

Um, I am curious about the airport.

Um, that was a big project.

And when you talk about the joint ventures, um I know that that was an avenue for us to do quite a bit of joint ventures, and so I wonder in your uh analysis if you looked at outliers like large, you know, the billion dollar project or outliers like our uh consent degree implementation.

Um so curious about if what the numbers will look like if we don't have that big uh robust, hopefully robust construction period, hopefully, you know, building a stadium that would be the next big thing, and then we'll have those joint ventures.

So curious about that.

Also, to our city manager or city manager, um, when several of our council colleagues, uh, primarily the third and fifth district council, we've gone to um Mr.

Gillian and we've talked about the implementation of our previous disparity study work.

So I'm curious about how are we going to ensure that the actual recommendations are put in place because there were quite a bit of things that have not been done.

Um, so before we go to these next steps and adopt these recommendations, we need to be really clear about how we're gonna resource um these recommendations and how are we going to um implement them to our um fine attorney Matt Zelotti?

Uh I'm curious about um our agreements with the federal government and the DEI and how this could you uh produce a memo for us to talk about the the how this intersects with one another and what we should be um aware of and those are all my oh last question for the team.

The did you evaluate you talked about evaluating policies?

Did you evaluate our um workforce in our fairness in construction policies?

And if so, what were your assessments of those things?

Thank you.

Yeah, so I'll answer that the workforce was not part of our scope, so we were only looking at uh businesses.

Uh, there was no workforce analysis.

The fairness of construction policy, which is um separate from workforce.

Sorry, Sydney.

Yeah.

Um, we would have looked at that.

I'll have to look at yes, we did look at all of your policies, so we did look at that, but I'll have to get back to you about whether I don't think we have any necessary conclusions about that.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Councilwoman Robinson.

Councilwoman French.

Uh thank you.

I also want to thank you for all this work that you've put into this.

I know we've been talking about this for several years.

I've been tracking it for the last several years as well as um coming on council having a lot of conversations uh with Jaime and the Creole department.

So I really appreciate very much advocating for this study and very much appreciate that that we're here now and we have this, and it's it's very detailed, and a lot of the recommendations um go off of a lot of the conversations I've been having in the community as well with business owners and contractors and architect and engineering firms.

Um, a lot of their concerns um are addressed in a lot of your recommendations.

I know you talked about um an engagement strategy that we have for public engagement sessions, and I know you've folded in stakeholder engagement with the private sector and business owners and contractors and in the study.

Are we gonna move forward with now that we're rolling out this the study and and informing um the public of the study instead of just having public sessions?

Are we gonna continue those stakeholder engagement sessions or those one-on-ones or those um small group sessions?

Yeah, our um, so I think there's two separate things.

What they they did part of that engagement for the study, our um uh rollout plan is what we mentioned earlier, but we definitely will be um having um the us going out and uh sharing a study, taking questions, talking to the community.

Uh that's our immediate next steps.

So, what we've had are our three sessions.

We have a speak easy going up as well.

We'll have a FAQ, and then uh obviously make ourselves available to any uh groups that we want that want to engage with us on the study.

So we want to be as transparent as possible.

Yeah, and I appreciate that.

I just want to make sure those groups are still involved.

They you know get the information from them, but now how do we still work with them to create policy and how we move forward?

So I want to make sure those groups are still involved, and um, I understand the recommendations for moving towards like small business and SLB or SLBE, moving towards that.

What does that look like when you're you're talking about minority and business and women owned business and moving to just a small business enterprise as far as personal net worth?

Where does that threshold lie?

Are there's different thresholds?

Because I know that's been kind of some of the concerns and stuff before hitting that personal net worth and then being graduated from the program but not yet being large enough to compete in the big large sector and then kind of having to fall back into that you know disparity and and falling back into WB and B program.

But then I know the SLBE they have different thresholds, and coming from when I worked in the architectural engineering side, what are those?

So there were different thresholds for different even projects.

Like if there were water services project or water department projects, the SLD goal was you know higher, the threshold was higher than other projects.

So we're looking at unbutton that's one of the um examples of unbundling a contract, we'd have a larger water project and we'd unbundle some of that and give some of that to the SLBEs.

And so I know as in that private sector, I've we would go after those projects and would qualify as an SLBE for those water services projects, but then wouldn't qualify as a small business, even though we were women-owned business wouldn't qualify as a small business to go after other projects.

So I guess how do we so definitely that's uh uh in the policy section of this as we implement uh I think what it is is we'll take the recommendation.

I I can tell you that we um just in our climate, we've been working on different things just in case something were to happen.

Um in that we are we're looking at modernizing our ordinance and and what are those things that we see now that we can implement going forward?

One of them is definitely that we've noticed that there are gaps in um support for businesses that are not quite large, but they're not quite small anymore.

Uh they still need some support, so we're definitely taking that into account on um uh what we've been working on.

So, and I know we've had a lot of conversations.

I'm excited about moving that forward, kind of looking at what like a second tier would look like or a third tier, kind of another um, so definitely that's to come, of course.

But in the meantime, as we move toward that's just kind of what I'm looking at, like where that personal at worth where that falls, and who qualifies as a small business, because you're saying a lot of the MB and WBs also qualify as small businesses, but there'll be some that that don't, and so then that will not give the opportunity to those MBEs and WBEs if they don't obviously necessarily qualify as a an SLBE.

So um I'll yield the rest of my time.

I think that's Councillor Rogers.

Very briefly, um, and I may be misunderstanding, but how does or how can utilization exceed availability?

I'm sorry, didn't hear the question.

So, how can utilization exceed availability?

So it's percentage-based.

So it's a percentage base, so you could have an availability of 10% minority, but you've spent 20% of your dollars with a minority group.

That's what I thought I was confirming.

Thank you.

Other questions?

Oh, go ahead.

That's right, go ahead, Council.

We just never did get the answer about the outlier question that I asked.

I asked a question about the airport and larger projects and outliers, so we did do the analysis of the outliers and where we took out contracts over a million dollars and looked to see if there was still a disparity, and then we looked took out contracts over a half million to see if there was still a disparity, and there was it was about the same um analysis.

It's in the report itself, there's a breakdown of us taking out all of the size.

We did not do it specifically about the airport, and remember federal contracts were not part of our scope, so we did not look at that.

So if you're if you're including airport federal projects, those were not, we would not have looked, we moved all the federal dollars were taken out.

So this was only um your local and state dollars that were being spent.

So they were combined with everything, so we didn't look at them separately.

So it was the airport a hundred percent DBE?

I wasn't around when those contracts were was that a hundred percent DBE?

Because yeah, I believe it was DBE because it was DOT funding, but we'll we'll we'll run that down to just make sure.

Um, it's been a minute.

And the DBE analysis would be a different analysis as you know, there have been some changes there lately.

Um but the DB analysis, and usually the airports do their own study of their federal dollars when they do their goal setting.

Mayor Purti.

Thank you, Honorable Mayor.

Thank you so much for the presentation.

Um my questions really are around the MSA and the boundaries of the MSA.

Can you just provide clarity on the area that uh you've utilized?

Probably need you to okay.

So Courtney will find that.

There's a list of the counties.

I don't know them off the top of my head, she's gonna look for them.

Uh, but it goes into Kansas City, Kansas.

I do know that that your MSA includes those counties as well.

She's gonna look for it right now, or you can simply say a number uh Mr.

Gilliam.

I don't know if you know the boundaries, according to our ordinance, it's seven counties.

Uh it's Wynat Johnson, um Leavenworth on the Kansas side, uh Clay Platt, Jackson, Cass on the Okay.

Okay, so then so understanding that, can you uh clarify whether or not the available analysis uh included all qualified firms or only those that were that were MWB certified?

So yes, so it would have been certified.

So our availability is we did what's called a list approach, which if you were on, because there's already willing and able, so we took firms who were, we took your vendors, your bidders, your subcontractors, your payees, your awardees, and your certified firms.

We also took those from uh we also took information from the Unified Government, Wyandotte County.

We also looked at state and um and DOT from the unified certification.

So we took all of those, and that became a pool, and again there's a list of all of the pool that went into our availability list, and then we took all the certification lists we could find from anywhere, matched it against that to determine the ethnicity and gender, because the only way you can really determine whether a firm is owned and controlled is whether it's certified or not.

There's really no other way to determine that.

However, I we did look, and uh councilwoman Robinson asked this question once before, and I did look at whether did our survey, whether, and that went to kind of everybody certified, not certified, and we asked them how they identified, and then we asked if they were certified, and about 70 percent of all of the um MBEs were certified as something, they were certified as something.

So there are about 30 percent out there who may not, who at least identified as being minority owned, um, who uh may not have been certified.

88% of those who identified as women-owned were actually certified.

Okay, so if the availability analysis, it sounds like it primarily included certified businesses, however, in your recommendations and your comments that you've heard uh through your community engagement, you stated that uh significant number of um the organizations specified that they maybe are available to do the business, but they're not certified uh uh somewhat in part to the barriers or challenges that they have with being certified in the city.

And so I'm wondering, I'm wanting to understand if that in my view that could mask some of the inequities if you're only counting primarily those organizations that are certified.

There could be, you know, a significant amount of businesses that meet like that could be available to do the work, but because they don't have the maybe administrative capacity to do the paperwork to become certified, they're not counted.

And so can you just speak to that case?

First of all, clarify if that if that summation is correct or not, and then clarify.

So I wasn't saying that that was that there we saw significant barriers to certification.

What I was saying is that it was talking about reciprocal certification, that it would be helpful if they didn't have to certify all over the place because most firms they got to certify in three or four or five different places, but we didn't necessarily hear problems about certification itself.

But when we looked at the survey, where we had you know several hundred firms who responded this survey, and we asked them how do you identify, and then we asked also asked them, are they certified?

We also asked them why they weren't certified, and so I think a lot sometimes you know there was not anything that was overwhelming as to why they weren't certified.

We did ask that, and if you look at the report, it's the last appendix has all of those individual answers.

So some would say, Well, because I didn't know there was a certification.

Some will say, Well, it was the paperwork, but there wasn't one overwhelming, like, why am I not certified?

But when we put the two together, um we just saw that about it was about 70 percent who said who were certified as something.

They were an SLB, they were a DBE, they're WB, or they were an MBE.

Um, so yeah, there's is there a gap between firms that told us they identified as minority and those that are certified, yes, there is a gap.

So could there be better efforts in getting firms certified?

Yes, but in terms of our disparity study, we can make a recommendation that you can just like we said, you could do a campaign on registration, is to get a campaign on firms getting certified, but in terms of being able to count them, there's no way for us unless we did a certification effort to know that firms that say they're certified that they're minority owned are in fact minority owned, and what our experience has been, because we have done studies where we've used had to use for whatever, there's a really high error rate of firms that identify versus firms that are certified.

So to answer your question more simply, yes, there could be a gap there, yes, there could be more efforts, but statistically there's no way for us to close that for purposes of the study without knowing that they're certified.

Okay, so um, okay.

So there are records.

You answer my question, but but I believe you you actually increase uh you give me hesitancy or concern about the validity of the study, about you know, about yeah, the validity of the study, in that if there are if there were more firms that were certified that were actually certified, it probably the results would be different, or could be if there were because we primarily looked at some that firms that were certified, and so I and I understand you're saying you couldn't you couldn't necessarily get to the number with the way that our system is set up today, but definitely I would be interested to learn how we potentially can move forward, uh what would be your recommendation to move forward to ensure that we're truly capturing at adequate and accurate data because I believe that without that information it can mask the inequities that they and disparities that we may actually have.

I absolutely agree with you on that.

And so those are recommendations moving forward.

The problem under the Crowson requirements is that the burden is on us to prove that there, so the burden is on us to prove that there are these disparities with firms and the and the problem is that unless again, unless we were undertaking to certify firms that claim to be minority and women owned firms, kind of difficult to do that.

So that's why we make it as a recommendation moving forward to make to undergo some campaigns to get people to certify, to get people to register, to get people to demonstrate who they are, because the burden is the proof that there is the disparity, not kind of the other way around, which is if there's a gap in data, well then you should get the bit.

What you're saying is this study should have given us the benefit of the gap in data, and I'm saying the problem is that the proof is on is has to be made that there is the that, and there's no way to do that.

Look unless they're certified.

I understand your point, but we have the burden, we have the burden of proof.

Okay, thank you.

Councilwoman Patterson has.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Um, so I have a couple of just kind of logical questions.

How did you what program are the non-minority firms in?

When you say what program?

So you said that you analyze the firms that are in the MBE program, MBEWBE program because they're that's how you captured that data.

So what program are the non-minority firms in?

How did you capture them?

So they're not.

So they're not necessarily non-minority firms, they're non-MWBE firms.

Correct.

And so what that means is that they are unidentified, they are not certified as anything.

Right.

Which also means that, of course, that MW non-MWBE could include firms that could be minority owned but aren't certified.

Right.

It could be publicly held corporations.

They could be white male-owned firms.

I'm not asking you to define them, I'm asking how did you capture them in your data if they're not in a program?

Because her line of questioning, her line of questioning was you looked at only the minority and women owned firms that are in the program.

That's how you did your utilization and your availability analysis, and that you didn't look at potentially minority and women-owned firms that identify that way that are not in the program.

So I'm just asking you, how did you determine what group the non-how did you find them if they're not in a program?

Because they were on the list that we used.

So if we used all pays, then we identified out of those pays who were the certified minority and women.

Who was left is the non-MWBE group.

So if we looked at payments, so I think I listed payment payes, bidders, vendors, subcontractors, awardees, um, certified firms, because you do have some non-minority firms who are SLBEs.

Um, they showed up on the small on the small business list on the state level, or they showed up with the Wyandotte counties uh firms.

So they showed up in the pool of firms that you have, but so we started with the big pool of everybody, the universe, and then identified out of that universe who were the certified minority and women-owned firms.

So I'm struggling with your conclusion that the availability and utilization is doesn't represent a disparity when you look at the totals and there's a really large gap in payments and participation between the firms that are certified and the firms that are not certified.

So I mean it's clear that the work is going to groups that are not certified, and so would you say the certification is keeping people from getting projects?

No, we don't have that's not a conclusion.

So the the disparity is the comparison between the percentage of availability and the percentage of utilization.

So if your availability, so yeah, and non-MWB firms are getting the majority of the work, but because they're the major because they're the it matches their percentage of availability, so who they are in the marketplace is the comparison.

So is it safe to assume that the non that a majority of the non-certified firms are white?

Or do you even make that pronouncement at all?

We don't make that pronouncement at all because it also could include publicly held corporations.

It could be include privately held corporations that are run by their board, it could be it could include so what it means is that on some level they're not certified as a minority or woman-owned firm.

So when these programs were first put into place, how was so let's say you don't have a program and you're trying to decide if you need a program, nobody would be certified, and so you would look at the whole community of available businesses, and so now if it you are limiting it to the certified firms, but logically it is not addressing the initial purpose of the disparity study because you are not including companies that potentially are qualified because they haven't labeled themselves, and so that's why I have a problem with the recommendations, because you didn't include the larger unifert.

First of all, let's just say nobody should have to be certified anything to be able to do the work, they should just be able to compete, and so that's what we're trying to correct for because obviously people are being shut out of the competition, and so this study doesn't include the companies that are potentially still being shut out because it's only 6.9%, 2.73%, and that may not represent the universe of companies that are available and that are just competing regularly and are not represented in the work.

So there's another way to do so.

To answer your first question, how did this kind of all come about?

So there's another way to do an availability.

I don't know if you can pull up the D and D analysis.

So there's another way to look at availability without using certified firms.

I don't think, but but it's your numbers are always going to be much smaller.

So the other way to do it, if they're if you didn't have a program to answer your question, where would what would we have done?

We've done a DMB analysis.

You go and done in Brad Street, a Hoovers, and you pull all the Hoover data out of Hoovers for the firms who do the work in the categories, and then you telephone those firms and you ask them whether they are who their ownership is.

So yes, there is another way to do it, but you but and we have done it that way when there's been that kind of situation that you're talking about, and the availability is always much lower.

And in fact, we did do it for you.

We did look at a uh a D a B analysis, and the availability comes out much lower.

So it's a when you thank you.

When you did your um qualitative analysis, were you hearing the firm satisfied that they were getting enough work?

Um, we get the opposite feedback on a very regular basis.

What I'm saying is, we don't we didn't actually say, do you think you're getting enough work?

We asked them about the policies and we asked them about their experiences.

So we don't when we do the anecdotal collection, what we say to them is tell us about your experience doing business with the city of Kansas City, attempting to do business, and if you haven't even attempted, why not?

And so that's the general question we ask them.

We don't because we're not trying to kind of point them in a direction, yeah.

And so we get a lot of feedback on different areas, including probably I would say the biggest comment that we made.

So I don't think that we actually heard somebody say we're not getting the business we should get.

What we heard people say is it's a good old boy network.

Yes, okay.

It's a good old boy network.

Same people keep getting the same work over there.

Slying for I'm not getting enough work.

Well, it's a slang for saying there are people who have an advantage to getting getting all of the work.

So, yes, if you want to put it the other way around.

I mean, it just begs the question.

Did you look at the systemic advantages?

Because if you know that there are advantages, and then you see the numbers are so far apart between the certified companies and the non-certified companies, it feels like the inherent advantages is not a part of the conversation.

If you're you're saying, given the inherent advantages, this is you're being utilized enough.

Well, no, we pointed out the inherent advantages.

We pointed out some of those in our recommendations.

How do you tighten up your own policies?

How do you do things that hopefully will give firms more of an opportunity?

And then from everything from how you keep your data to how you get more firms to register and to certify to how do you there are a number of other things that we recommended in terms of unbundling contracts so that smaller firms we did do a private sector analysis which talks about the fact that minority and women owned firms are more likely to be small, which probably you could have guessed, but we demonstrated that statistically.

So then what can you do to help these smaller firms get the work?

Well, one of them is unbundling.

So a lot of our recommendations are about what can the city do through its processes and the way that it does its awards in order to give more firms, particularly smaller firms who will tend to be minority women more opportunities.

So I mean, I think that's what we tried to do in our recommendations, exactly what you're suggesting.

How do we close the gap?

Yeah, I mean, well, it just feels like there's conflicting sentiments because we see a very large gap in who is actually being awarded contracts, and on the same hand, I'm interpreting your study to say that the utilization is actually good.

Well, what we're saying is that what your statement that that there is a gap, we weren't seeing that same gap that you're talking about statistically.

So what we're saying is that when we looked at the data, the payment data compared to the availability data, in in there are some areas, and we listed those those ethnicities and gender groups in certain areas, but across the board, we weren't seeing those gaps that anecdotally may be there, but statistically aren't there.

Okay, councilwoman French.

Um, I have a question.

I'm hearing both my colleagues and I'm trying to digest all of those too because I've had some of the same concerns, and I had brought up some of the same questions when I kind of had a debriefing before.

So you're looking at you know a larger pool of firms, but then what's actually in the data were the actual certified firms, and I agree that you you don't shouldn't need to be certified in order to get the work, and we should make it a lot more streamlined to be able to get certified certified, and that's some of the frustrations that I've heard as well, just that the city makes it a little more difficult to be certified.

But in your data, my question is I'm trying to understand in your in your data you're looking at the percentage of availability versus utilization, and that there were some firms that did receive work but weren't necessarily certified.

And I'm just I guess I'm just putting it together that right a lot.

And so I'm I'm putting it together though, had they been certified, our percentage of availability wouldn't have went up, and our utilization would have gone up, and we're already high in our utilization, so then those numbers would have just gone up, and so it would have made us look even more successful.

Not necessarily, because again, we applied the same data to both sides of the equation.

So again, if I added more, and again, we don't know this because the data's not available to do that.

So if I added more firms, let's say there were another hundred firms that aren't certified that are minority and women owned, and I add them to my availability, those same hundred firms could be added to my utilization.

I don't know that.

So my utilization could, my availability may go up, but so does my utilization and my end result would my comparisons would still be the same.

So what we did to one side of the equation of utilization of availability and utilization, we did to the other.

So the same firms that were counted on one side of the equation were also counted on the other side of the equation.

So theoretically, one way or another, they would they could likely even out.

And a lot of times what's missing are those upper end firms, because a lot it's the firms who tend not to get certified will tend to be um there's there's some ethnicities that may or may not get certified, but they're also the upper end firms will a lot of times tend to get not get certified because they don't need to get certified.

So your larger minority firms may not be certified.

Um so when you start to do the comparison of the two, you're using the same, again, making sure that we're apples and apples, that you both sides of the equation are equally judged.

And that's I guess my point was if you added more to the pool that you know weren't certified, but had they been certified, would have may have counted.

So we might be in the same boat that we are now, is what I'm saying, the same data showing that we're the program's successful, I guess.

And I guess because we're too successful, it's showing that we don't have disparity, which we all know is not true.

Not true, but that's kind of what it's showing.

So I would you think again?

I I'm I mean, I'm just trying to I I feel like there I feel like there could have been better there could have been better tests, or maybe you could have did just some tests, like what is the certification doing to utilization?

Is the certification itself having a negative impact on utilization because the non-certified firms are doing very well, they're getting over 70%, sometimes almost a hundred percent, of the work that's available, and so um, how do you anticipate or can you extrapolate how things will change if you remove their minority status?

Why would they just not get utilized at all?

I mean, so we did do a no goals analysis, okay.

So, what happens when there are no goals?

How do primes behave?

Prime contracts should be because remember, you had some overutilization on the prime side, which is the city's direct contracting with firms, you had some overutilization there, but then the other side, so that's how is the city behaving?

The other is how are your primes behaving out in the marketplace?

So we did a no goals analysis where there were no goals on contracts, how did firms behave, and we still had over you some overutilization?

We had um and that that's in the report as well, and no goals analysis.

Just looking for the um, yeah.

In the no goals analysis where there were no goals on contracts, African in construction, only Native Americans and women-owned firms were underutilized, and then in AE, um, only Asian American, Hispanic American owned firms were underutilized in professional services only Hispanic American owned firms, and in other services only Asian American, Native American and WBE firms.

So where there were no goals, you still had overutilization.

So that's how that's how the reason we want to do a no-goals analysis is to see is the reason there's overutilization is because you have a program.

Well, the way to test that is you look at what happens when there are no goals.

One thing that I would like for you, if it's possible, um, do you know how long we've had a program?

Almost 30 years, I think.

So what I would like to see actually is a bar graft of um how how the companies in the certification program have performed over a longer period of time.

Um I suspect there's a number of companies that have just gone bankrupt and and not been able to keep up due to underutilization, and so they're out of the pool.

Um, so I mean it would be helpful to know over time, did minority and women-owned firms actually get too big to be in the program, and so now are they out and they're in the other pool.

Um I think it's to me it's not helpful to look at such a I mean especially since you're recommending a really drastic change in my opinion.

Um it feels like over time, what did the what did the program actually do to uh to firms?

Because I know at least three firms that um that went out of business.

I know about shadow banning, um I know about um bidding, disparity in bidding, where bidding is too high with smaller companies because capacity, and then change orders with the um company that is selected, but we don't capture any of that um in terms of what is happening because the program is supposed to grow the amount of qualified firms that are available, but this looks really small.

So if there's 60 per 6% compared to 92%, then I can't tell how program is having an impact over time.

So we did do a private sector analysis and we did some regressions, all of that meaning that we did come out some of what impacts you is the marketplace itself.

So is the marketplace providing because for you to have firms to utilize, they have to be they have to be available in the marketplace.

So if you look at the study, there is are some outcomes, particularly if you look at the findings.

I didn't go through them just for the experience of time.

But for example, um minority and women are less likely to be self-employed in your marketplace, um, and as a matter of fact, black black households are um substantially likely to be less employed than white households, so uh households um headed by women are also less likely to be held.

So there are a number of things that affect the marketplace that is your feeder of film firms who are going to be that ready, willing, and able to do work with you where there are problems in the marketplace.

Well, that's my point.

So if you've had the program for over 30 years, it should be it should be improving the marketplace, it should be making companies more available because they're prosperous, and it looks to this in 2026, looks like we haven't grown as a community that is it's remained um I mean so far behind the nine certified companies.

So what is happening as a city that people aren't catching up at all?

Like they're not catching up.

So I think that's a big problem.

Manager baskets and people aren't catching up.

And we're reducing the goals, and we haven't even caught up yet.

So that's strange.

And there are a lot of firms who reported like one of the things is that controlling for other factors.

We found that African-American-owned firms, six percent, and 12% of SLBs are less likely to report that they themselves feel like they're ready, willing, and able to do work as primes or subcontractors.

And so I always wonder that, and again, our study is a little bit superficial in the sense that, you know, we don't have the capability of going a lot deeper with some of these responses, which is why is it that minority and women-owned firms don't feel that in themselves that they are ready, willing and able to do is it because of their experiences trying and failing?

Um so we do ask in the survey um a number of questions as to why do you think, you know, why aren't you registered to do business?

Why aren't you certified?

And so that's what we do try to address in some of our recommendations.

So I understand your point, which is there's some gaps here that because of some gaps in how things are done, that there are reasons why there may not be more utilization.

Well, that's why we make the recommendations to try to improve the utilization, even if it's can't be on a purely race and gender conscious basis.

A lot of this is we're finding that small firms, minority women-owned firms tend to be small.

We also know that at least right now your certified um SLBEs tend to be minorities and women.

So when you put in goals and you put in accessibility to the process of SLBEs, you're in fact hopefully starting to get to the same places with minority and women-owned firms without it being tested under the crows and under the Crowson test for a race and gender conscious program.

So I understand the difference.

There's this legal kind of uh compelling government interest that you have to do in order to continue a race and gender conscious program.

That doesn't stop you from putting in um remedies to help to increase participation, you just have to go about it a different way.

Okay, so and I agree with you, by the way.

I mean, when we went back because I don't know how y'all got to 35% out the gate, and we're struggling to maintain 14%.

So I'd love to know about that.

Yeah, when y'all built that airport back in the day, y'all started y'all's goals very high.

Well, you know, that was pre-crocen, right?

So Maynard Jackson put in place that 35% of all contracts with the city that had to go to not just minority but black owned firms, right?

And then Crosing came out, and they had to do disparity study, and the program actually got named because uh Maynard Jackson said, I don't understand what the brew ha ha is about, all we want is an equal business opportunity, and that became the name of the program.

I've always admired him.

I'll just say very briefly, although you're doing an exceptional job at answering, I'll do a very quick short legal analysis that'll probably keep me from the Supreme Court.

This the courts suck comparatively comparatively to how they existed and operated, I think, 30 years ago, full stop.

And if you're wondering, every week they're getting worse.

I'm not gonna go on a diatrop about the voting rights amendment of the chief justice, the majority of our supreme court justices are viewing race in a way that's very different, and I think us being able to figure out how to adapt our programs to ensure that they continue to create more opportunity for our community, is much of why we're spending the time here.

Councilman Curls.

No offense to anybody married to judges or anything, and taken uh yeah, thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

Um, and I know that we're we're short on time, but and and I probably'm sure there's other questions.

Uh but anyway, uh one question that I do want to ask, and I'll follow up with some other questions later on at a different time.

But I just want to make sure I understand on your overall recommendation to transition to small business SBE or select MWBE contract by contract goals.

I haven't had an opportunity to go through the whole 329 pages of the report yet.

But is there some data or some information in this report that tells us the contrast or the difference between those two?

And I think you mentioned earlier to Councilwoman Robinson's question that there are other municipalities that have transitioned to this SBE or SBLE or S L B E.

And are those cities comparable to Kansas City, or how are they relatable, if they are relatable, or how can we have a good understanding as to if this or which one is the best fit for us to go with based on your recommendation?

Yeah, and I can follow up and give you some more information.

I can do that as a follow-up with specific cities and what they're doing.

Some of these are counties, so you know Palm Beach County is pretty substantial size.

Um they've had to transition.

Um Memphis has had to transition.

Um like I said, every place in Florida has had to transition.

We're in the middle of some other studies, which uh again I'll I'll follow up with where they're gonna have to transition very large cities, um, just because of the outcome of the data.

I would tell you, probably, and this has just become a local phenomenon.

I've been with the firm for 19 years, and um didn't used to be that we found we would normally not find this.

I mean, I don't know if it's because some of the more mature programs are actually training their their firms that if you come to this jurisdiction, you know, we want to see participation, um, but um it's only been in the in just the past several years that we've begun to see some overutilization in some major metropolitan areas.

So, but your first question, you said the difference between the S the SLB, yeah.

You've got you said in the your your presentation, transition to small business enterprise or select MBE contract goals.

Is that what's the difference between the two?

Okay, so the there are certain still certain groups who were underutilized.

So if you continued your MB MWB program as it is, you could still continue it for those groups in those categories, but not for the groups who were not listed in those categories.

And in construction, that was no cat, no groups, but for the other categories, you could continue your program for those groups.

It's just that it's a checkerboard, you know, you'd have to eliminate Asian Americans out of this category, you'd have to eliminate African Americans out of that category.

So that list that's on um, and I don't know if we have that slide again, but that's who you could keep that program in place for the same way you've had your program to date.

Okay, uh, yeah.

If you could follow up with that other information for me, um, and that data, I'd appreciate it.

Thank you.

Mayor Pro Tem.

Okay, thank you.

I have one last question.

If minority firms are primarily functioning as subcontractors, how did the study reveal that there is no disparity?

Because ultimately, you know, the prime, prime is these nine M and WBE firms are getting 84% as prime.

So, how did it determine there's no disparity when when the M and WBE uh con organizations or businesses, firms are only getting what 15%, 15.48%?

So we didn't just look at subcontracting, so we looked at prime contracting.

There was some overutilization of MWBE firms in prime contracting.

But then when we put the subs in there too, and we looked at all dollars.

So what we looked at, so we looked at prime only, and then we looked at when all dollars are spent, whatever the city's budget was, when all dollars were spent with vendors, whether it was primes or subs.

What was the outcome?

So it wasn't just subs, it was looking at the totality of the awards, right?

And so then looking at the totality of the awards, when you compare it prime, when you look at the specifics, I don't understand how if the minority women-owned businesses only represent a portion of a small percentage of the how was how was no disparity established?

How did you because you're comparing availability to utilization?

So, if minority-owned firms represented 10% of availability, and they represent 12% of utilization, then when you compare the two, you have some overutilization.

So it goes back to what we talked about in the beginning that if they're not stating that they're available or that they have capacity to do the work, then they weren't tech technically they weren't counted.

That makes sense, okay.

No, they they didn't have to demonstrate that they had capacity to do the work, they were demonstrating the the way to determine whether they were available was that they were on some government list.

They were registered, registered with the government, they were pre-qualified, they bid on something, they did something that demonstrated their interest in doing business with government.

They were in one of those categories and they were within the relevant market.

That's what went into the whole pool.

Okay, I'll have more questions, but I know we're about an hour over, so I will follow up.

After I read the 300 and some pages, I'll follow up.

We're available.

You know, of course, we're we're happy to answer all your questions.

Thank you.

Director, anything further for you?

Uh I just want to thank everybody for their time and for their questions.

Um, I know that this is a shift.

We're we're we're ready to make anything that council decides ultimately the decision is is within this body, and we're ready to respond.

All right, thank you.

Thank you for your presentation.

Thank you for your time.

Any further business come before council in this business session?

If not, we'll adjourn.

We'll take about five minutes and try to start shortly after.