Civil rights director says she pushed minority hiring at big project. Then KC fired her
Andrea Dorch couldn’t find out why minority hiring goals were waived on the giant data center project commissioned by the parent company of Facebook in Kansas City’s Northland.
But the now former director of civil rights and equal protection is certain of one thing. She believes she was fired from her six-figure City Hall job this month for aggressively trying to hold that project to the same standards as others receiving massive taxpayer incentives.
“I believe I was targeted for doing my job,” Dorch told The Star.
City Manager Brian Platt denies that’s why he let her go. His staff said she was in violation of the city’s residency policy. But her recent firing has set off a furor among those who believe otherwise within the minority business community.
They see an obvious connection between Dorch’s firing and her refusal to give in to what Dorch claims was Platt’s relentless insistence that she back off her efforts to have the Meta project follow normal protocol on minority participation in a project receiving tax breaks.
“I can’t think that it would be related to anything other than the Meta project,” said Joseph Mabin, a member of the city’s Fairness in Construction Board and former director of the Minority Contractors Association of Greater Kansas City.
Kelvin Perry, president of the Black Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City, agrees and says Dorch’s firing and the circumstances leading up to it demonstrates the city’s lack of commitment to ensuring that Black and brown business people share in the city’s wealth.
The Black Chamber is among several groups that have called on the city’s elected leaders to reverse Platt’s decision.
“We insist that Ms. Dorch be reinstated to her position without delay,” Perry wrote Mayor Quinton Lucas and the rest of the city council in a letter dated April 19.
Also calling for her reinstatement was Unified Contractors, the trade association formed last year from the merger of groups representing Black and Hispanic builders. The Fairness in Construction Board wrote a letter in support.
The Black Chamber also called on the council to amend the development agreements with the two corporate entities behind the Meta project to include the minority hiring goals that Perry believes should have been included.
In the wake of Dorch’s firing and the uproar over it, the council will begin considering that suggestion next week, two city officials said. But Dorch remains unemployed one week after her resignation took effect last Friday.
She was widely seen as an effective advocate for minority rights and inclusion in the two years she held the job.
Dorch joined the city staff in the 1990s and was on Lucas’ transition team in 2019 before taking a job with the federal department of Housing and Urban Development. She returned to City Hall at Platt’s invitation in 2021 to run the city’s half-century-old Human Relations department.
Platt praised her publicly when the department was rebranded two years ago as the Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity department to showcase the city’s commitment to equal rights.
“Director Dorch brings a passion for the mission as well as top-notch organizational skills and experience to the position,” Platt said at the time.
Residency rule
According to assistant city manager Melissa Kozakiewicz, Dorch’s firing had nothing to do with the Meta project. At a meeting in his office on April 7, Platt demanded that Dorch resign because he said she was in violation of the city’s requirement that employees live within the city limits.
“The Meta conversation was a surprise to us,” Kozakiewicz said.
Dorch and her supporters scoff at that. It was no coincidence, they say, that Platt’s demand that Dorch resign came one day after she published a 17-page report detailing her department’s oversight of Project Velvet, the code name for the data center project before Meta revealed its involvement as the lead tenant for the Golden Plains Technology Park at Interstate 435 and U.S. 169.
The report recites in detail the pushback she got from Platt as she attempted to get Turner Construction, the general contractor on the Meta project, to provide data on minority participation on the project that she could verify.
Dorch acknowledges that she bought a house in Lee’s Summit during the break in her service for the city to work for HUD, but she says she has always claimed her mother’s address in Kansas City as her residence of record for city employment.
Dorch said her residency became an issue only after she began raising questions about the project.
“It’s something that they do as a pretext when they are going after somebody, they use the residency rule,” she said.
Others subject to the rule have been granted exemptions, such as a fire captain who lives in Washington, D.C., most of the time while working for the International Association of Fire Fighters union. Some have been given time to move into the city.
Dorch was not given those options, although she maintains that she is technically in compliance with the rule that defines one’s residence as their “permanent home and principal establishment and to which, whenever he is absent, he has the intention of returning.”
The city says it has fired 20 employees in the last couple of years for violating the residency policy.
Project Velvet
A subsidiary of the local engineering firm Black & Veatch called Diode Ventures announced plans for the nearly 800-acre Golden Plains Technology Park in 2020. A year later, the city council approved what’s known as a Chapter 100 industrial development plan that could conceivably grant billions of dollars in tax incentives over the next four decades.
By that time, Diode had taken on a secretive partner in the project called Velvet Tech Services LLC, which was later revealed to be Meta.
As work began last year on what some still refer to as Project Velvet, Black and Hispanic business owners began to suspect city government had betrayed them either intentionally or by accidental oversight when the incentive package was granted.
Were women and minority contractors getting their fair share of the work? Were construction workers being paid the prevailing wage? Dorch’s department was supposed to know those things, but none of the data was being provided.
“We just couldn’t get any information on it,” said Gabe Perez, president of the Unified Contractors of Kansas City.
Together, that trade association, the Black Chamber of Commerce and the city’s Fairness in Construction Board urged Dorch to investigate. And what she found surprised her.
Project Velvet was under none of the regular obligations to meet or report on goals for inclusion of women and minority contractors.
Unlike nearly all projects receiving big tax breaks, there was also no wage floor and no requirements that any of that information be provided to Dorch’s department.
It was all legal, as Chapter 100 projects have none of those requirements per se. But the city could have added them to conform with its policies.
Dorch and even some city council members are still unclear how that waiver was granted without public discussion when the project sailed through various approvals in 2020 and 2021.
Councilman Lee Barnes says that members of the council assumed the minority participation requirements had been included.
But no one caught it on the committee when it was advanced to the full council for passage.
“So when it was brought to us in the legislative session, I guess the assumption that most of us had was that it had gone through its normal process,” he said.
Perry with the Black Chamber says that’s an unacceptable excuse and Perez suspects someone with the city must have known what the council had waived to make the developers happy.
“This was a well-planned attack on the program to circumvent everything that’s needed, you know, a small group of people that wanted this to happen, and pushed it through,” said Perez, of the Unified Contractors.
Meta meeting
Dorch couldn’t make the Meta project comply with the usual requirements to recruit minority and women subcontractors. But she tried to get voluntary compliance.
After discussions with Turner and Meta, she arranged a meeting last fall that was attended by two councilmen from the Northland, Dan Fowler and Kevin O’Neill; Dorch and her staff; as well as representatives of Turner and Meta.
Barnes, another council member, arrived late and says that by the time he got there an agreement had been reached.
According to Dorch’s April 6 Project Velvet report, Turner agreed to voluntarily comply with the minority contracting goals and a $15 minimum wage, almost as if the Meta data center were any other big project with tax abatements.
O’Neill confirmed that account in an interview this week. He said Meta’s attorney, Jim Bowers Jr., reminded officials that Chapter 100 does not have a component requiring goals for minority and women business participation in the design and construction work, nor for paying the prevailing wage.
“But in this meeting,” O’Neill said, “they agreed that they would pay prevailing wage and they were gonna follow whatever MBE, WBE (minority and women business participation standards) … they were given.”
But things broke down soon after when Dorch’s department asked Meta to sign an agreement. The companies refused, Dorch said in her report, and Platt issued the first of several orders in the months to come that she should let up.
“I get a call from Brian Platt telling me that the two councilmen from up north had contacted him and said that I was going to — I won’t use the word— but basically, that I was gonna mess this project up,” she said in an interview.
He reminded her, she said, that it’s ultimately a $100 billion project over the course of decades, “and that, you know, I needed to stand down on any enforcement.”
”And so I explain to Brian, that, hey, you know, this is just normal protocol. This is what we do.”
Dorch said she needed to have the hiring and wage data from the project for her department’s overall report on minority inclusion.
Turner provided data, but it wasn’t in the form she wanted and the company began refusing to let her inspectors on site to verify that information or talk to workers and investigate claims of discrimination she’d been getting, Dorch said.
According to her report, Turner sent a Feb. 9 letter to its subcontractors telling them they need not comply with requests for data from Dorch’s department.
“Rather than voluntarily comply in a transparent manner, Turner Construction Company determined that it would control the narrative as it relates to utilization of businesses without any independent verification,” her April 6 report on Project Velvet said.
“Additionally, based on numerous complaints from subcontractors, including complaints of racial discrimination in the form of a ‘noose’ hanging onsite, many subcontractors reported feeling ‘stuck’ in an exclusionary public contracting process.”
Dorch said the noose was investigated and addressed by Turner, which held a meeting with all contractors and employees.
Based on Turner’s data, the report said, 5.5% of the contracted work went to minority business enterprises and 8% to women business enterprises. The citywide goal was 14.7% for minority and 14.4% for women businesses.
The company responded to The Star’s questions about the project in a written statement on Thursday:
“Turner is committed to provide inclusive and welcoming jobsite environments where people can be at their best, be authentic, and are treated with dignity and respect. We are also committed to offer diverse companies opportunities to participate in a meaningful way on our projects.
“To establish and sustain meaningful relationships with diverse businesses, we have held more than one dozen meetings and events that have reached at least 150 minority and women owned business enterprises (MWBEs) in the Kansas City area.
“We are meeting obligations for diversity on this project and are voluntarily and transparently reporting progress to the City on a monthly basis.”
The statement went on to say that the company is committed to increasing its use of minority and women contractors “and increase the diversity on the project.”
In response to The Star’s inquiries, Meta also issued a short statement that said the company “is in compliance with all legal requirements and city ordinances applicable to this project. We are excited to be building a presence in Kansas City and are committed to continuing to work with the city as this project progresses.”
No confidence vote
That Meta can truthfully say it is in compliance with the law is exactly what’s wrong here, said Perry, the Black Chamber of Commerce president.
Someone on the city council should have posed questions about minority participation on the project before property tax exemptions were granted, he said.
“I think they’re still trying to figure out how it happened,” he said, “but what that says to us is that attention has not to been paid to the need of minority businesses and the development that’s needed for minority businesses, because these are massive projects.”
As Dorch’s report on Project Velvet begins to gain wider circulation within the business community, some are calling for further investigation of the allegations in the report. Among them is the Heart of America Chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors, which advocates on behalf of that part of the construction industry that is non union.
“The allegations that city ordinance regarding workforce participation and MBE/WBE utilization were ignored are concerning,” ABC Heart of America president Michele Roberts-Bauer said in a written statement on Friday. “The community has a right to know if these allegations are true and what will be done to remedy them.”
Dorch’s dismissal and the Meta project were among the issues discussed at an hour-long closed-door meeting of the city council one week ago.
The Urban Summit, a group of Black community leaders, had urged its members to attend the public sessions beforehand to support what they said would be Councilwoman Melissa Robinson’s attempt to get her colleagues to support a vote of no confidence in Platt.
Days beforehand at a committee meeting, Robinson said she was frustrated with the number of discrimination lawsuits that employees had been filing during Platt’s watch that were costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time.
“Increasingly, week after week, we have the settlements,” she said. “That it doesn’t seem like we’re getting any better in this area is concerning.”
But if there was a vote, Platt survived it as he remains in charge at City Hall.
Next week, a council committee plans to take up a proposed ordinance Barnes introduced that would require council approval before any employee is dismissed for allegedly violating the residency rule.
O’Neill said he is sponsoring legislation that would impose on the Meta project some or all of the voluntary minority participation and wage rules that Dorch negotiated back in November.
Meanwhile, she is contemplating her next move.
“I have taken action steps towards preserving my rights for litigation, if it would come to that,” she said.
This story was originally published April 28, 2023 at 12:30 PM.
