The state-contract pie needs better slicing
A controversial, now-discarded preference toward women and minorities in the awarding of state contracts had outlived its limited usefulness, Spokane architect Sue Lani Madsen says. If Olympia really wants to help those businesses, better to find a way of slicing contracts into bite-sized pieces for startup companies.
Madsen is a one-quarter partner in Madsen, Mitchell, Evenson & Conrad, a 14-employee shop working on private contracts like the design of the new Premera Blue Cross offices on East Sprague, and public projects such as the expansion of Washington State University’s Martin Stadium.
Madsen questions the dismal numbers the Office of Minority and Women’s Business Enterprises reports on state contracting with such companies. The most recent figures show minorities with but three-quarters of one percent of a $2.8 billion pie, women with 1.17 percent. She attributes the decline to the absence in the state estimates of any work done by firms that could qualify for special status, but do not go through a burdensome certification process. Since the 1998 voter passage of Initiative 200, which eliminated contract set asides for women and minorities, getting a certificate is superfluous, she says.
Better to focus on doing the best work possible, and gradually earning the stripes that count for so much when public agencies weigh one contractor against another.
“You need the experience in the private sector before you can go after state contracts,” says Madsen, who once obtained a certificate so the architectural firm she worked with in the early 1990s could show the required share of minority or women-owned business participation. The exercise was something of a farce.
And, adds Madsen, qualified women/minority contractors sometimes found their practices limited because years of government work had locked them into a niche — building schools, for example — and left them ill-prepared for other types of work when those projects were completed.
When Madsen Mitchell organized seven years ago, the two male and two female partners decided not to weight ownership toward the women to leave the option for certification open, she says. “I just wasn’t impressed with what it was doing for women- and minority-owned businesses.”
The trick with preferences is knowing when to let them go, Madsen says.
Set-asides for women might have been appropriate when the WSU architecture school graduated just six out of a class of 60, as it did when Madsen got her degree in 1978, but not when women entering the profession equal or outnumber men, she says.
As for minorities, Madsen says, individuals she has spoken to found preference demeaning. “I don’t think we’ve had the institutionalized racism we’ve had in other areas (of the country),” she says.
The head of the Inland Northwest chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners is less sure prejudice is a thing of the past. Many members still seek certification, if only as a credential, says Shelley Runolfson.
In the competition for government contracts, she says, “We lose them to the old boys network.”
Carolyn Crowson, OMWBE director, agrees with Madsen that certification can be a tedious process, one the office is working to simplify. And Madsen may be on to something with her suggestion the state tailor more work to the abilities of small business.
“We’re looking at what we call right-sizing,” Crowson says. “That’s very key to supporting small business in the state.”
Crowson says the obstacles faced by minority-owned businesses in obtaining state contracts are not racial. They are symptomatic of ways of purchasing, for example, that favor the known business over the newcomer, who may well be smaller, to boot.
“I hear about it day in, day out,” she says.
Madsen says construction activity has reached such a peak everyone who can lift a shovel is busy. Businesses owned by women and minorities have an opportunity to earn reputations that will carry them through leaner times, she says.
Leaner without meaner. We can hope.