DuPage County commissioned disparity study highlights diversity and inclusion as a priority going forward
In 2019 the DuPage County Board amended its strategic plan to include “diversity and inclusion” as a priority with the goal of creating a minority and women’s business program, emphasizing transportation, public works, stormwater and facilities management work.
“It’s a priority of mine and I think it’s important to the entire board,” DuPage County Board Chair Deborah Conroy said in an interview with the Pioneer Press. “Our county has become much more diverse in the last 10, 15 years or so, and I believe diversity is our biggest strength here in DuPage County.”
Over the last four years, the county has collected data from construction contracts, implemented Disadvantaged Business Enterprise tracking software. Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) programs provide contracting opportunities to small businesses owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals. For over a decade Cook County has used DBE data to keep track of who is receiving
The county also commissioned a disparity study, conducted by CH Advisors, Inc., a legal consulting firm based in San Antonio, Texas, to analyze how much money the county spent on construction related contracts and the background of the companies being issued said contracts.
Colette Holt, a former Chicagoland native and founder of CH Advisors, presented the firm’s findings during a Sept. 12 county board meeting, finding construction and construction related contracts issued by the county between 2017-2021 significantly favored nonminority owned business.
During the five-year time frame the study was conducted CH Advisors found the county issued $131,336,270 in construction related contracts approximately 10.7% of which went to minority or women owned businesses.
The remaining 89.3% of contract dollars went to non-DBE companies with either white male majority ownership or companies with non-race or gendered ownership such as publicly or employee owned businesses, Holt said.
The study recommends a number of actions to improve the inclusion of minority and women’s owned businesses, including the creation of a department to handle business opportunities, track contract outcomes moving forward, set loose DBE goals and review the data every 5-6 years to evaluate whether race and gender-based barriers have been reduced.
“We’re not telling anyone to hire someone who is not qualified, who can’t do the work, that’s a fallacy,” Holt said. “I always want to stress, nobody has to be hired, these are goals programs, they are not quotas.”
It’s going to take time before the county can act on the information presented in the study, Conroy said. “Now that we have the study we’re going to be moving forward, it’s probably going to take a year before we have a full program.”
