Revised City of South Bend Disparity Study Report

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CCS of South Bend Disoarity Study 2020 The construction industry, it's very male -dominant. Many participants commented on barriers to City contracts in particular. Access to information about opportunities was mentioned as a frustrating challenge. It's very difficult. You have to have a relationship with the buyers, so that the buyers call you up and say, "Hey, you know, we're going out on a bid on this" You're not given information. You just have to like claw through stuff to try to find it, to see what's going on. You try to go to their website, you can't find the information. It has last year's dates on it. Just trying to get to a phone message or to talk to someone. You got to a phone tree just to find out when just a meeting is and then when you get the information, and if you need to take something to those meetings to promote yourself, it's like 12 hours beforehand and you may not have all the documents or things like that. There is said to be a clear exclusion, especially to Black -owned and African American companies, to get access to information. Contract size is a major impediment to M/WBEs performing work for the City, especially as prime vendors. There's plenty of room for [minority firms]. We just want the crumbs. The crumbs will satisfy everybody in this room. We don't need that whole... We can make those crumbs work. If you make [contracts] so big, none of us here want to lose, or in other words, embarrass ourselves, then say, 'Well, that's why we don't hire minorities, because they can't get the job done.' They're making the contracts too large. They need to narrow them down. We do demolition only. There's a little excavating involved in it because we have to clean the holes out and some compacting, but these contracts are getting huge. They'll link them in with building. They'll link them in with dirt work, and so therefore, this larger contract, just say well, 'I'll just pick whoever I want, because once they get the contract, it's out of the City's hand.' Several business owners described barriers to the City's procurement process and contract specifications. The [City's] specifications are all messed up on the [commodities] items. 46 01010 Colette Holt & Associates, All Rights Reserved.