Revised City of South Bend Disparity Study Report

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City of South Bend Disparity Study 2020 —should not be the benchmark for a program designed to ameliorate the effects of discrimination. They have acknowledged that minority and woman firms may be smaller, newer, and otherwise less competitivethan non-M/WBEs because of the very discrimination sought to be remedied by race -conscious contracting programs. Racial and gender differences in these "capacity" fac- tors are the outcomes of discrimination and it is therefore inappropriate as a matter of economics and statistics to use them as "control' variables in a dis- parity study. 124 Fourth, it has been upheld by every court that has reviewed it, including most recently in the successful defense of the Illinois State Toll Highway's M/WBE program, for which we served as testifying experts.125125 To conduct the Custom Census forthis study, CHA utilized three different data- bases: 1. The City's Final Contract Data File (described in Section A of this Chapter). 2. A Master M/WBE Directory compiled by CHA. 3. Dun & Bradstreet/Hoovers Database downloaded from the company's website. With the City's Final Contract Data File, we culled through the file to eliminate any duplication of firms that received more than one contract during the study period. The Master M/WBE Directory combined the results of an exhaustive search for directories and other lists containing information about minority- and woman - owned businesses. Specifically, we built this file by the following steps: We collected all relevant government and private sector directories of M/ WBE firms. We dropped any listed firms which did not have the necessary complete set of values for the race, gender, and industry variable. We went back to the original contract data provided by the City. Because the City's contract records for prime vendors did not contain race or gender assignments or any industry indicators (the City had not collected any subcontractor information), we were not able to include any data from the City's file. 124. For a detailed discussion of the role of capacity In disparity studies, see Notional Disparity Study Guidelines, Appendix B, "Understanding Capacity." 125. Midwest Fence, Corp. v U.S. Department of Transportation et al, 840 F.3d 932 (2016) ("Midwest Fence II"); see also Northern Contracting ill, 473 F.3d 715 (7th Cir. 2007), cert. denied 15-1827, June 26,2017. © 2020 Colette Holt & Associates, All Rights Reserved. 61