Businesses owned by women and minorities made substantial progress in winning state government contracts in the past two years, according to a report released Tuesday.
Minority and women businesses received 21 percent of the $4.5 billion in state procurement made in fiscal 2005, representing $954 million, an increase of about $400 million in the two years since a commission headed by Lt. Gov. Michael Steele revamped the program.
Actual payments to minority business enterprises totaled almost $570 million. The Ehrlich administration considers that yardstick the most important way to gauge success, since contract awards don’t guarantee payment and the contracts often extend over several years. However, the state has only tracked payments for two years.
“We have one measure — green,” said Gov. Robert Ehrlich. “The bottom line is the bottom line.”
Some Democratic legislators and black business owners have questioned the commitment and performance of the state under Ehrlich. But Garland Williamson, head of Information Control Systems and president of the President’s Roundtable, an organization of black CEOs, insisted, “What we reported here today is real. … These are real dollars and real numbers.”
Williamson served on the Steele commission overhauling the state MBE program in Ehrlich’s first year, but he admitted, “I worked against him” in the last election. “I didn’t know these folks,” he said. But now his support is “based on action, not rhetoric.”
“You can’t have a pro-business state if asignificant part of your population is left behind,” Ehrlich told more than 100 business people attending the release of the study.
The report on the program was prepared by Sage Policy Group, headed by local economist Anirban Basu.
Basu’s study found that every minority subgroup received higher awards of state contracts. Awards to black contractors rose 19 percent; to women, 32 percent; to Asians, 22 percent; and to Hispanics, nearly 50 percent. Despite these improvements, the state goals for improving awards to subgroups were not all met, since these benchmarks have been raised by the legislature.
In terms of the $570 million in payments, women-owned business got 19 percent; black businesses got 17 percent; and nonprofit organizations and sheltered workshops for people with disabilities each got 23 percent.
Williamson said Maryland this year became the first state to mandate commercial nondiscrimination by contractors. If contractors do not have diversity in their suppliers and subcontractors, “then you will not be doing business with the state anymore,” he said.
