KCK cuts women- and minority-owned hiring requirements to avoid Trump pushback
Wyandotte County government code will no longer mandate that officials encourage women- and minority- owned businesses to work with them on construction and other contracted projects. And, government staff aren’t required to track information on whether they’re increasing opportunities for those businesses.
At least, not for now.
The Unified Government Board of Commissioners last week, by a 6-2 vote, decided to suspend sections of its code that require staff to make a concerted effort to offset the fact that the local government has historically underutilized people of color and women as contractors. Commissioners Melissa Bynum, District 1 at-large, and Andrew Davis, District 8, voted against the measure.
Their decision comes as President Donald Trump’s administration clamps down on diversity, equity and inclusion practices across the map. The administration has threatened to claw back federal grant funding from local governments throughout the country if they don’t comply with its interpretations of anti-discrimination and immigration laws.
The federal government’s interpretation? That adopting policies or programs designed specifically to give marginalized people, like women and people of color, opportunities violates civil rights laws.
And although county commissioners and Mayor Tyrone Garner have said they don’t agree with that view, they said they had to adopt the item to protect local programs for aging residents, housing assistance, community health care and more.
All those programs, and about 117 local government staff members, rely on the roughly $28 million that the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, gets in federal grant funding each year. During the 2024-25 year, the government received $80 million in federal grants to be spent over the next few years.
“We don’t have enough employees even now,” Fifth District Commissioner Mike Kane said ahead of the vote. “I don’t like this and it’s one of the most awkward votes I’m going to make in my time here. I don’t like it but I don’t know what to do about it.”
The suspension will last until the Unified Government determines that the “political landscape” changes in a way that allows it to implement ordinances like this without the government at risk of losing that needed funding. Officials are also keeping an eye on ongoing litigation related to Trump’s anti-DEI orders.
Logan DeMond, a policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, told The Star that changing ordinances in anticipation of punishment is unnecessary when no direct threats have been made to the Unified Government.
“These actions pose a threat to a more diverse, equitable county at the expense of local control,” DeMond said during a recent committee meeting, adding that repealing and suspending ordinances and practices means the Unified Government is “bending the knee to an administration drunk on power.”
Taking funds back
The federal government can refuse grant funding to local governments and take away grant funding that it has issued. And, that money can be clawed back even after it’s spent, whether local governments have the money to pay back the feds or not, said Zee Bishop, a Unified Government attorney.
“We have seen a number of grants come in that have required the Unified Government to certify that it does not run any DEI program or any immigration programs in violation of this administration’s interpretation of federal anti-discrimination and immigration law,” Bishop said during a committee meeting last month.
Losing those funds would put several local services at risk, according to the Unified Government. It said it uses federal funding to offer meal sites that feed 300 senior citizens weekly and deliver 400 meals to seniors. Also at risk would be $4.7 million in funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and services to 5,309 residents that rely on WIC each month.
The Unified Government also uses federal funds for investing in local business, to help people build attainable housing, offer services for people at risk of becoming unhoused and fixing local parks and infrastructure.
“None of our constituents should think that if we take action tonight in support of these resolutions that we are endorsing what the national government is thinking with its turnout and turning its back on diversity, equity and inclusion,” First District Commissioner Gayle Townshend said ahead of last week’s vote. “That is not what this is about. We are charged with being responsible and protecting funds that could come into the Unified Government.”
Suspended ordinances
The Unified Government established its supplier diversity ordinances in 2009, a few years after a government-sponsored study found it had “statistically significant underutilization of minority and woman business enterprises as prime contractors or subcontractors in various categories of Unified Government contracts,” according to the suspended code.
So, the government adopted systems to correct this by increasing opportunities for those businesses and working them into contracting work within the city and county. “The intent of the board of commissioners is to achieve its supplier diversity goals through the use of race- and gender-neutral remedies to the extent feasible,” according to the now-suspended code.
The code outlined options to attract those businesses, like having a small contracts rotation program, lowering insurance requirements, creating an expedited payment program and educating businesses about contracting opportunities at the Unified Government and how to get them.
Those ordinances also mandated the county administrator’s office to collect data on how many minority- and woman-owned businesses the government hires as contractors.
“It shall be the policy of the Unified Government to afford minority business enterprises (MBEs) and women-owned business enterprises (WBEs) the maximum opportunity to participate in the performance of Unified Government contracts and subcontracts,” according to the suspended code. “... and to assure that all unreasonable obstacles and impediments to such participation within the Unified Government’s control are eliminated.”
‘Full court press’
Gabe Perez, president of the Unified Contractors of Kansas City, said that although he hadn’t heard of the vote to suspend those ordinances, he wasn’t surprised given the actions of the federal government.
“That’s kind of the move,” he said. And, regardless of people’s political leanings, he said, people of color and women make up a significant proportion of the local labor force. So, removing specific protections could affect not just employees, but “everybody up and down the line.”
The Unified Contractors of Kansas City, a combination of the Minority Contractors Association of Greater Kansas City, and the Kansas City Hispanic Association Contractors Enterprise, supports minority- and women-owned businesses in the greater Kansas City area.
Perez said the Unified Contractors have been more involved with efforts to preserve programming for MBE and WBEs in Kansas City, Missouri. He has tried to get KCK to build a more established programming for minority- and women-owned businesses, although those efforts haven’t gone far, he said.
During an Oct. 27 committee meeting during which commissioners considered whether to move forward with the policy changes, they also discussed changing other policies involving when and how the government investigates discrimination claims. That item resurfaced, after being rejected in committee, during last week’s full commission meeting. Board members tabled it for the time being.
DeMond, of the ACLU, later told The Star that the government’s legal team made a “full court press” to pressure commissioners into making their decision based on the possibility of threats.
Although the ACLU of Kansas has seen efforts from corporations to curry favor with the Trump Administration elsewhere in Kansas, this is among the more blatant examples of folding to the will of the federal government that he’s seen this year, DeMond said.
“This is very unusual,” he said, adding he hopes Mayor-Elect Christal Watson and incoming county commissioners elected this month will revisit policy suspensions and “change course” when they take office.
