Great news on KC minority and women contractors. Why so glum, City Council? | Opinion
Kansas City just got some great news about trends in its contracting with minority- and women-owned businesses. Unfortunately, City Council members seem unwilling to take the win.
In 1989, the Supreme Court held that governments cannot award contracts based on race without a compelling governmental interest supported by evidence. Since then, governments have regularly commissioned disparity studies to determine whether race-conscious contracting programs can survive constitutional scrutiny.
To get that evidence here, the city commissioned the Atlanta-based consulting firm Griffin & Strong to dive into seven years of contracting data. That report, 300 pages in length, was presented to the council on May 14. The study’s task was to determine if the evidence supports race- and sex-conscious contracting preferences.
The conclusion: It does not.
Michele Clark Jenkins, Griffin & Strong’s director of research and methodology, explained that Kansas City appears to have reached a point where minority- and women-owned firms are participating in city contracting at levels that often meet or exceed their proportion of the available market. That is the benchmark such studies use to determine whether contracting outcomes suggest discrimination.
Griffin & Strong concluded that Kansas City’s contracting outcomes no longer support a sweeping race- or sex-based program. In short, she said, “You just don’t have the factual predicate” necessary to continue offering such set-asides. While the study did identify instances where certain groups were underrepresented, they were not sufficient evidence to justify race-conscious remedies.
The consultants did not recommend abandoning efforts to expand opportunity altogether. They advised Kansas City to shift toward small-business enterprise goals instead. Because many local small businesses are owned by women and minorities, that shift would allow the city to address many of the same concerns without being exposed to legal challenges.
One might expect the report to be cheered as a sign of success — that Kansas City has turned the corner on ensuring proportional representation in contracting. But that was not the case.
Mayor Lucas: ‘The courts suck’
Several council members appeared dissatisfied with the findings. Councilwoman Melissa Patterson Hazley questioned whether the study had captured the full universe of minority-owned businesses, fearing that many contracts continue to go to firms not considered minority or women-owned. She also suggested that the study failed to capture the full extent of continuing disparities.
On the first point, Jenkins explained that expanding the number of minority owned businesses in the study would not have changed the results. It would entail adding those businesses to both the available firms and those awarded contracts. She said there was no evidence doing so would yield different results.
Second, Jenkins responded that while there may be anecdotal evidence of continuing disparities, in seven years of contracting data: “We weren’t seeing those gaps that anecdotally may be there — but statistically aren’t.”
The report did identify barriers to small businesses related to firm size, access to capital, networking, procurement procedures and marketplace conditions. Many of those barriers affected small firms generally, regardless of race, which is why the consultants recommended small-business remedies instead. As Jenkins put it, if the city wants to pursue greater participation by minority- and women-owned firms, it must “go about it a different way.”
Recommendations included addressing those barriers through race-neutral reforms such as unbundling large contracts, improving outreach, eliminating duplicative registration requirements, streamlining procurement procedures and paying contractors more quickly. A 2024 report by the Institute for Justice reached many of the same conclusions.
Oddly, Mayor Quinton Lucas complained that “the courts suck” because they no longer view race discrimination the way they once did.
That misses the point. The report did not argue against positive racial discrimination on principle. Rather, it said that the city had achieved the sort of parity that made such minority and women owned business set-asides unnecessary.
The report should have been welcome news and a source of pride. It suggests the city and the marketplace have both come a long way in combating race and sex discrimination. That City Council members see this as something to resist says more about them and their worldview than it does about Kansas City.
Patrick Tuohey is co-founder of Better Cities Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on municipal policy solutions, and a senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to Missouri state policy work.