re: Mayor Broomes (BR) to announce consulting firm for $300,000 disparity study next week

Let me give you some OE from someone who spent a little over a decade working for a general contractor. When they say “diversity”, they really mean black owned businesses. #noshit

Example #1. There are a whole rash of businesses that solely exist to be pass through for minority quotas. In other words I need to buy 300 drainage structures. So i pay T-Pain & Assoc to purchase the structures for my site guy to install them. T-Pain charges a markup, of course (I’ve seen as high as 30%). Now here’s the kicker. T-Pain doesn’t have the equity to buy the stuff on credit, so i write Joint Checks to the supplier for the material. So T-Pain literally does absolutely nothing to collect his 30%.

Example #2. I once did work for a school board in a local parish. We had a diversity “goal” of 20% of the total project cost which was not a requirement. The way it was stated was “local and disadvantaged businesses”. We had a ton of documentation on who bid us on bid day and needless to say we weren’t anywhere close. Now we did some things to help, like got subs to buy materials from a local supplier, etc. I’m always about keeping business local wherever possible.

The kicker was I had to meet with a diversity consultant. I did my homework and had a plan together and presented that I’d hold a job fair to try to get local people hired by my subs. We actually were able to put some people to work, which was pretty cool. People that lived locally got to help build the school. Anyways, the consultant glossed over my proposal and started asking me for information about specific companies bids and why they weren’t selected. “It was important to hire local contractors.” Then I got a rash of calls from people wanting to send pricing that didn’t bid on bid day. They assumed we would be contacting them for our quota.

So once again, it isn’t about helping people, it’s about helping certain people.