Affirmative action was under fire in Palm Beach County. Sentiment was growing among several county commissioners to junk the south Florida county's 10-year-old Minority and Women Business Enterprise program, which attempted to steer a percentage of county contracts to firms owned by women, blacks and Hispanics. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau added depth, by detailing the growth in minority and women- owned businesses and population in the county.
While the contracting industry, which wielded considerable political clout, largely supported getting rid of the county's MWBE program, minority residents - represented by a single African-American commissioner - were pushing to keep the initiative in place. Across the state, affirmative action was also facing a possible electoral challenge by activist Ward Connerly, who had chosen Florida as the next battleground for his state-by-state attack on government and university affirmative action programs.
And Gov. Jeb Bush enacted a plan that eliminated racial quotas at state universities and ended the program for state contracts in departments that answered directly to the governor. Answering the question Lots of passionate, sometimes angry rhetoric flowed on both sides of the issue. But no one seemed to be able to answer a basic question: Had the county program shown benefits over the past decade that made it worth saving?
The county's only minority commissioner proposed having staffers conduct a study of the program's effectiveness. That idea was rejected by the white commissioners. At the time, I was a reporter covering county government at the Palm Beach Post. My editors and I decided that if the county wouldn't do an analysis of its own program, the newspaper would. Readers would then have some hard information on what the program had really accomplished and could make their judgment about whether it was worth preserving.
Taking advantage of Florida's broad public information laws, I requested access to all records pertaining to the program. The response was surprising. Although commissioners refused to study it, the county had collected reams of data on the program over the years. And they weren't opposed to us examining it. Lots o' files County staffers brought me to a large room filled with filing cabinets, and let me loose for several days to rummage through 10 years worth of contracts, program applications, reports and correspondence.
Not only did the county have information on the MWBE program, but it also had files dating back to nearly 10 years prior to the program's start. That gave us a good basis for comparison. Unfortunately, all of this wonderful information was on paper. So we set up a laptop in the county office and began entering contract data by hand into a large Excel spreadsheets. From the paper reports, we focused on two key items - contracts awarded to women- and minority-owned businesses and contracts awarded to white-owned firms, both before and after the affirmative action program was put in place.
The data entry took some time. But it ultimately ended up as a multiple-worksheet spreadsheet that totaled the number of contracts awarded per group per year and compared racial and gender groups. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau added depth, by detailing the growth in minority and women-owned businesses and population in the county. The Census information also helped us counter the idea that the county awarded few contracts to minorities prior to the program because there were very few minority businesses.
In fact, there were plenty - they just weren't being hired by Palm Beach County. The analysis was bolstered by traditional shoe-leather reporting, including interviewing business owners, elected officials, legal experts and activists on both sides of the issue. This type of story is by no means unique to Palm Beach County, or even Florida. Many counties and cities across the nation adopted such programs in their contracting departments during the 1970s and 1980s, but they don't always study them to see how businesses actually fared.
CAR helps reporter That's where a reporter with some CAR skills can step in and analyze a program local government officials might not. If you're lucky, the county's contracting department produces an annual report that summarizes contracts and contractors by total amount, race and gender. Be prepared for lots of additional work if you find you have to tabulate contracts by hand. In either case, the spreadsheet is probably your most valuable tool for tabulating the data.
Basic Excel skills taught in newsrooms or at NICAR's boot camps are enough to calculate the data over time and see very quickly and clearly whether an affirmative action program has really improved the picture for minority businesses, or whether it is just lip service used when campaigning in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Findings Our findings in Palm Beach County were described in the resulting story: From 1980 to 1989, black, Hispanic and women-owned businesses received a yearly average of just 4.6 percent of all county contracts.
That's about $4.4 million, compared to the average $96 million. In 1991, when the program was launched, the share of contracts going to women and minorities leaped to 15 percent, or about $25 million a year. By 1998, the latest year for which statistics are available, women and minorities earned 16 percent, or $34 million worth, of the county's business. But while the share going to women and minorities has increased, the vast majority of public dollars still flows to firms owned by white men.
The program, the story concluded, had a concrete result that had boosted public dollars to women and minority businesses in an environment that heavily favored white-owned companies. That gave some substance to our coverage of the issue, and gave our readers more to contemplate than just the hot air being blown on both sides of the debate. The staffers who ran the county's affirmative action program lauded the Posts's story as a clear, understandable presentation of a complex issue.
Ultimately, the piece was cited by many in the county's minority community who sought to defend the affirmative action program. And the county's sole black commissioner referred to our findings on several OC-casions in lieu of an official county report on the program. While Bush enacted his statewide plan despite strong opposition from the minority community, affirmative action remains in place today in Palm Beach County.
Trebor Banstetter, who previously worked at the Palm Beach Post, is a reporter at the FortWorth Star-Telegram. He can be reached by email at tbanstetter@star-telegram.com