Minneapolis affirmative action enforcement is : WEAK

By Anna Pratt (September 26, 2007)

Originally published in The Spokesman-Recorder

Many City contracts don’t comply with civil rights ordinance, study shows

In Minneapolis, numerous City contracts have gone to contractors out of compliance with the Civil Rights Ordinance, according to a 63-page report from the Humphrey Institute. The Humphrey report, authored by retired judge LaJune Thomas Lange and Lawrencina Mason Oramalu from the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations & Social Justice, found “excessive noncompliance” over the past several years.

The report attributed this noncompliance partly to a lack of resources and effective management, which “do not convey a sincere commitment to achieve full compliance…”

Reactions to the report vary from shrugs to shock, with many falling somewhere in-between. Meanwhile the now-scrutinized Contracts and Compliance Unit (CCU) has been working to return to compliance with the 30-year-old ordinance.

The CCU is an arm of the Minneapolis Department of Civil Rights (MDCR), overseen by the Civil Rights Commission. Commissioner Kenneth Brown said he was not surprised by the report’s findings but “didn’t know how bad it was. … [T]he whole system is broken down completely. There’s no respect, honor, coordination or trust.”

Larry Blackwell, a 20-year Commission veteran, said he is shocked by not only the report, but the lackluster reaction to it. “Not having enough manpower isn’t a good excuse.”

What went wrong?

Under the 1967 Civil Rights Ordinance, contractors must file an affirmative action plan before receiving a city contract. CCU, however, stopped collecting affirmative action plans sometime in 2005, according to the report. On top of that, neither the City nor its individual departments have filed an affirmative action plan over the past decade.

Since 2002, there have been approximately 1,606 price agreements totaling $523,502,872 and 933 contracts totaling $429,383,375. There were 461 affirmative action plans and 2,160 registrations, according to information provided by the Civil Rights Department.

Even when the contractors had drawn up a plan, many did not meet the labor hour goals, which call for 11 percent minority participation and six percent female participation.

When it came to enforcement, though, sub-par contractors only had to sign a Letter of Agreement (LOA) promising to “do better” next time around. Additionally, the LOAs, intended to be agreements between two parties, contained no signatures from City officials.

Of 30 contracts examined for the study, 16 had received LOAs. None of them had affirmative action plans. Between 2000 and 2006, 20 contractors received more than one LOA, and six contractors received three or more.

Contract monitoring was also an issue. Of 425 construction projects from 2000 to 2006, roughly 120 projects a year are monitored. The report found that several multi-million-dollar projects weren’t monitored at all, or were falling through the cracks. (After the CCU review, the consultant requested additional materials, finding that one contract over $10 million didn’t appear in the LOA database but had 13 LOAs.)

Internal issues

Communication about contracts from other departments was erratic, often bypassing the CCU even though they require a stamp of approval from the Civil Rights Department. The report also found that the CCU is greatly understaffed, with fewer than half the number of employees it had in 2000.

(Incidentally, it took a year for the Humphrey Institute consultants to obtain materials for the study, while some puzzle pieces are still missing.)

Also complicating things is the revolving door of civil rights directors. Ironically, it was one of the directors who spurred the study.

Michael K. Browne, an adjunct faculty member at the St. Thomas University School of Law, served as interim civil rights director from May 2006 to June 2007. He commissioned the study after he was unable to get to the bottom of things in the department.

During his tenure, “Not a single officer brought a contract to me that they thought was noncompliant,” Browne said. He had a very difficult time obtaining monthly reports, and said it wouldn’t leak out that a company was noncompliant until the end of the project.

“I wanted to have the unit investigated. I didn’t feel things were being done right,” Browne said. “The true power rests with the employees… without proper supervision, there’s no checks and balances in Contracts and Compliance.”

Many employees echoed such concerns in the report. One employee was quoted as saying, “People were not doing their job. No one was monitoring contractors. Vendors are saying they are using minorities, but they were not using them. I would ride by and not see any minorities. I think it is a joke.”

The study examined CCU’s internal operations, while a disparity study to follow later this year will focus on external factors such as marketplace availability to detect discrimination.

Affirmative action plans

Another previous director, however, had a very different reaction to the report’s findings. Jayne Khalifa, now deputy city coordinator and former civil rights director from 2004 to 2006, said she stopped requiring the portion of affirmative action plans that remains fixed from year to year.

“It wasn’t that we stopped requiring affirmative action plans. We stopped requiring that it be changed every year,” she said. “All this hoopla about noncompliance… Only certain parts of the affirmative action plan change on an annual basis.”

It’s the difference between looking at what part of the affirmative action plan shows that a contractor is making progress or meeting its goals, versus poring over a stack of paper, she said, claiming that it has been overblown. “People aren’t looking at the departmental situation, at the resources or what was actually done,” she said.

Instead, the idea was to confirm that a company had an affirmative action plan, and to submit key employment data if a contractor had a workforce deficiency in the past in order to correct the problem. That would free up staff, Khalifa maintained, giving them more time for on-site monitoring.

She stressed that change occurred under her watch, pointing to some companies that had been noncompliant but are now leaders in affirmative action. “I left before anything was implemented. I’m not sure what they did afterwards.”

Next week: Current CRD Director Michael Jordan and members of the city council respond to the report.