ST. LOUIS — A top city official on Tuesday walked back a proposal to lower some hiring goals for minority and women businesses on the downtown convention center expansion and said construction firms will still need to show good-faith efforts to hit city contracting goals.
St. Louis Development Corp. Executive Director Neal Richardson’s comments followed a vote last week by his board to approve a memorandum of understanding with St. Louis County regarding minority and women hiring goals on the $210 million expansion of America’s Center. The two local governments are splitting the cost of the project and SLDC officials said the agreement was meant to harmonize each jurisdiction’s minority and women participation rules governing publicly funded projects.
“After we’ve had deeper conversations with our legal counsel, and also the mayor’s office, we want to ensure that we are keeping and staying true to our ordinance,” Richardson told the Post-Dispatch in an interview. “SLDC will be working closely with them, the construction teams on the America’s Center Project, to meet the goals of the city ordinances and not just what’s set forth in that MOU.”
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The expansion, pushed for years by its operator — the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission — is finally poised to begin. The city has already issued its bonds and a measure advancing the county’s share is awaiting a final vote by the St. Louis County Council. The project will be funded with hotel taxes expected to be freed up when the debt on the Dome at America’s Center — where the NFL Rams played until 2016 — is paid off this year.
Richardson said the minority hiring ordinance “supersedes” the MOU, and his office will push contractors to meet city goals on professional services. Even so, contractors can still come in under the goals as long as they show “good-faith efforts.” And the St. Louis Agency on Training and Employment can issue waivers on some goals. It already issued one last week for the city’s goal that 23% of the project’s labor hours come from city residents, citing “the current labor shortage in the construction industry.”
Not all city goals would have been lowered. The changes proposed in the MOU would not have affected labor hours for minorities and women, which the city and county both set at 25% and 7%, respectively. Nor would it have changed the city’s construction contract goals for minority-owned — a total of 24% — and women-owned — 11% — businesses. (St. Louis County’s women-owned construction contract target is lower, at 9.5%).
Rather, the changes were proposed to align the city and county’s goals for professional service contracts to mirror the county’s ordinance, which sets the goals at 16% for minority firms and 15% for women-owned companies. The county has a narrower professional service definition that includes just architectural and engineering work. The city has a broader definition and a higher target for minority-owned professional service firms, at 25%, but a lower goal for women-owned firms, at 5%.
In addition, requirements for labor hours from city and county residents, which each jurisdiction sets at 23% in their ordinances, would have been reduced to 15% city residents and 11.5% county residents.
“We were trying to make sure that there was some level of compromise since everybody’s vested in this to make sure everyone walks away from the table happy and no one feels like someone’s taking over versus somebody else,” said Vladimir Monroe, who heads compliance with the city’s minority business rules at SLDC. “That was the original intent. We thought we had a decent compromise on this.”
But Alderman Marlene Davis, an SLDC board member who was a co-sponsor of adding requirements for minority and women contractors to publicly funded projects, voted against the move last week.
“The numbers that are required for these development projects are not that high anyway, and then to reduce them makes no common sense,” Davis said in an interview. “I don’t care about the county’s stance on this. They’ve always been behind.”
Monroe, though, said the city, contractors and unions need to do more to promote the construction industry to build the workforce and business community if the city hopes to meet its goals, especially as a wave of retirements in the industry loom.
Richardson said he’s spent a lot of time in his first few weeks on the job building up the city’s workforce development efforts, putting money in the budget to add monitoring technology at SLATE and to hire another compliance manager to monitor contractors. He also said the city plans a new disparity study to help align the city and county minority hiring ordinances.
“We’ve been very intentional around investing into workforce development, ensuring that we are being very equitable and inclusive in our hiring and enforcement,” he said.