Gov. Charlie Baker said Thursday he believes he has expanded the state’s contracting with minority and women-owned business during his tenure, despite a WGBH News series showing the value of state contracts to minorities has dropped over the past two decades.
“I’m pretty sure we are doing better than we were doing when we took office,” Baker said during his monthly appearance on WGBH News' Boston Public Radio.
State and local officials have come under pressure from lawmakers and activists to boost minority contracting in the wake of reports published last week by WGBH News' New England Center for Investigative Reporting revealing that minority businesses have seen a declining share of state contracts over the past two decades.
Read more: The Color Of Public Money
According to data compiled by WGBH News, minority business owners competing for state contracts were awarded $135 million less in 2018 than they were in 1998 based on inflation-adjusted dollars, state records show. That’s a drop of 24 percent.
But Baker said that since he took office in 2015, the minority contracting goal has been raised "every year practically for the past four or five years" for agencies spending their discretionary budgets, which covers their regular daily operations and services. This money is separate from some major construction projects, which are funded and managed by state agencies. Those numbers also don't include contracts issued by local governments.
“I’m pretty sure we are spending more money on MBEs — so-called minority business enterprises — and women business enterprises today as a percent of our total [budget] than we were spending then,” Baker said.
A study commissioned by the State Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM) found that just 1 percent of its design and construction spending between 2010 and 2015 went to African-American contractors, down from about 4 percent in a previous study of spending between 1999 and 2004. DCAMM handles the state’s major public construction projects and manages state facilities.
The Black Economic Council of Massachusetts issued a statement in response to the WGBH News series demanding that the state convert its Office of Supplier Diversity into a freestanding agency and ramp up its budget from just under $1 million this year to $5 million by 2023.
Baker said Thursday that his administration reconstructed this office to get better insight into minority hiring data.
“We spent a ton of time peeling this thing apart and then rebuilding it after we took office because we actually couldn’t make sense of what we had when we got there,” Baker said. He made no commitment to boosting its funding or authority.
Amplify Latinx, a local non-profit created to boost Latino economic and political power, responded to Baker Thursday with a statement of their own.
“A great deal more needs to be done to increase the number of contracts being awarded to minority-owned businesses,” it said. “The WGBH series has made it clear that we can no longer afford to leave out one of the fastest growing segments of our workforce and economy.”
The group pointed out that more than 30,00 businesses in the state are Hispanic/Latino owned, but only about 275 of those firms made the state’s list of 2,700 certified minority businesses.
