Everybody Gotta Eat caters an event at Starlight Square in Central Square on June 6. (Photo: Marc Levy)

A hearing on racial and gender disparities in how Cambridge awards contracts could be held before April, after a report found that of the professional services firms who were vendors in a five-year study period, only 1.3 percent were certified as minority-owned. About 5 percent were certified as white women-owned.

The numbers may be blurred by the city’s reliance on large, publicly held vendors such as Staples over small businesses, officials said.

The City Council approved a request for City Manager Yi-An Huang to facilitate a public hearing or working session to discuss the disparities. Also on Feb. 12 the council referred the matter to its Economic Development & University Relations committee, which is chaired by councillor Paul Toner.

That committee hearing would be “hopefully before end of March,” Toner said Monday, as he was working on finding a day for members and staff to meet.

The council policy order arose from a now yearslong debate about how Cambridge awards contracts on everything from construction to office supplies. After the council started thinking about disparities in 2018, councillor Patty Nolan said, the city held a meeting on the topic in 2020. From that meeting emerged a February 2021 directive that the city conduct a study.

Findings from report

The city hired Griffin & Strong, a law and consulting firm specializes in the work, to analyze city contracting habits between July 1, 2016, and June 20, 2021. The firm held hearings, surveyed Cambridge’s business community and interviewed individual businesses, among other efforts. It released its final report in December.

In addition to the findings about service businesses, Griffin & Strong found numbers for supply firms that looked even more skewed: 0.37 percent of those firms were certified minority-owned, while 2.72 percent were certified white women-owned.

Besides a few construction contracts that consider race and gender, most of the city’s contracts are awarded on a race- and gender-neutral basis.

“The study findings support the city expanding its use of race and gender-conscious policies in order to remediate active and passive discrimination based upon race and gender. It also has a rational basis to provide programs that benefit veteran-owned firms,” the report read.

“A bad hand from a stacked deck”

Councillor Ayesha Wilson, who filed the Feb. 12 policy order, called the results “disheartening.”

“I would want to use the word ‘disgraceful,’ honestly, especially to the Black community,” she said about the disparities. “What this disparity report shows us is a manifestation of systemic racism. As a city, clearly we have been dealt a bad hand from a stacked deck that has not been shuffled, that we did not shuffle.”

During the meeting, Huang pointed out that the study’s data might have some caveats. Though many of the businesses that the city contracts with are not certified as minority- or women-owned, Huang explained, that does not mean that all of the money spent with those businesses goes to white men. He gave Staples and OfficeMax as examples: Because they are publicly traded companies, the city can’t certify them as minority- or women-owned, though presumably not all of their revenue goes to white men.

“One of the challenges as we look at the report is parsing out more clearly exactly what some of the data says,” Huang said. “I think there’s more work for us to do to really drill into some of these categories to better understand how much of it is going to, ultimately, public companies that cannot be certified as minority- or women-owned businesses. But I think the findings still remain just very compelling for us to act on.”

Relying on big businesses

The city often contracts with large businesses because they can deliver products faster and more cheaply than smaller rivals, Huang said.

“A lot of public procurement essentially comes down to lowest bidder. And a lot of larger companies have the ability to both have lower costs and also deliver really, really fast,” Huang said.

If the city wants to give more contracts to smaller businesses, Huang said, it needs to decide if it is willing to regularly pay more for some services.

The a council passed an order in October 2018 asking the city manager and staff to improve outreach to local businesses when bidding opportunities arose and to be clear on how local small businesses can become city vendors – increasing “accessibility at each stage of the contracting and bidding process.” It is not clear that staff under Huang’s predecessor took action.

Looking to local businesses

In showing her approach to contracting and suggesting one for the city, Mayor E. Denise Simmons also used office supplies as an example.

“I heard someone mentioning how we purchase from Staples and W.B. Mason. I’m always very intentional – it’s University Stationery, it’s Bob Slate, because those are the people that are in our community,” Simmons said. “We can make sure that money that comes out of this community – the City of Cambridge in particular – goes back into the community.”

University Stationery Co. is a a veteran-owned business in Cambridgeport. Bob Slate, in Harvard Square, is owned by a woman.

Vice mayor Marc McGovern, who wrote the 2018 order, echoed Simmons’ thoughts on contracting with local businesses. “I remember being on School Committee and losing my mind that we contracted with some pizza place in Lawrence,” McGovern said of Cambridge Public Schools – a school district with offices that have never had pizzerias more than a few blocks away, whether it’s Alfredo’s, Angelo’s, Aram’s, All-Star or Mona Lisa’s (now King’s).

Next steps

During discussion, councillor Sumbul Siddiqui noted that the city received in late January “a very strongly worded” letter from Russell Paul, senior BizGrow attorney at Lawyers for Civil Rights Boston, a group of attorneys who work with communities of color and immigrants to fight discrimination. Siddiqui said that in his letter, Paul wanted to ensure that the city takes appropriate measures to address its contracting disparities.

Huang said he planned to meet with Lawyers for Civil Rights, though he noted that parts of Paul’s letter were “misreadings of the report.”