Companies Run By White Men Dominate City Contracts

You see those tiny little lines on top of the big blue bars? Yeah, those are contracts awarded to companies not run by white guys.

Just as the city is dealing with a scandal involving four white contractors stealing money from city coffers, Comptroller John Liu has launched a website with some sobering figures about the city's contracts to companies run by women and minorities. Namely how few of them there are.

According to Liu's website only 2.3% of city contracts are going to women or minority owned businesses. How much is that in dollars? That's $398 million on the one side and $16.6 billion on the other. To drill down a bit, that is $125 million in contracts to women-run-firms, $184 million to Asian-American firms and $89 million to black or hispanic-run firms. It's actually a pretty slick, if depressing, site and offers lots of ways to look at the data, including by city agency and ethnic groups.

Bloomberg's folks aren't taking the accusations lying down though, saying Liu's people are comparing "apples and oranges and elephants" by conflating contracts that went to government agencies, union welfare funds and ones that were required by law to go the lowest bidder. Which sounds exactly like what we would expect them to say.

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By Garth Johnston in News on December 17, 2010 5:19 PM

Comments [rss]

Guest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

silver

qwerty

inoyourider21

I'll bet that the percentage of minority (read black of course!) and women owned businesses bidding on these projects is comparable to the percentage winning those bids.
Time to stand up on your own two feet.
The day of the race card is over.
No more excuses and passing the blame, time to carry your own weight.

Petey

How come when a contract goes to the lowest bidder (ie construction) and there's overruns, its not eaten by the builder?

silver

thats the game playa

Rocknrope

It's good to be a white male in America.

In other news, fire trucks are red.

WesternQueensLand

Our Corrupt Workers/
Lead the way to fraud, waste and/
"Shield" entitlement/
#Haiku #freeparking

Yahtzee

What should be broken down is who is a crony of Bloomberg's and where he has money invested. Either directly himself or through third parties. The money trail needs to be followed.

GalBklyn

Not a huge fan, but you gotta like John Lui's approach. Death by thousand cuts. Slow and steady.

Keep peeling up that carpet. Time for some light.

Guest

bad economy,
and fucking assholes stealing;
i am fucking mad.

EDIT: ALL I'M SAYING IS THAT THE GOVERNMENT IS SUPPOSED TO SET AN EXAMPLE, EVEN FOR DIVERSITY. IF THE ABOVE WERE HAPPENING IN A PRIVATE COMPANY, THAT COMPANY WOULD HAVE BEEN SUED (WHICH IS ENABLED BY... THE FUCKING GOVERNMENT!) WITHIN A HEARTBEAT.

I FUCKING LOATHE GOVERNMENT HYPOCRISY.