Council will hear results of the Racial Disparity Study

In November 15th’s Council Work Session, the Council heard a presentation about LFUCG's recently commissioned Disparity Study.

Two of the main recommendations from the report written by the Mayor's Commission on Racial Justice and Equality focused on disparities within the city's contracting process.

• Specifically, the Economic Opporunity subsection called for increasing the number of city contracts awarded to Minority-Owned Enterprises.

• To understand if there are significant disparities in city contract awards, the city needed to fully understand the demographics of firms that have received city contracts. So, the city commissioned a disparity study to analyze that.

• We last reported on this disparity study when the RFP was released for it in January of 2021.

A preview of the report shows that there are indeed disparities in the city's contracting. Here are some of the numbers from the report:

• The study analyzed city contracts and subcontracts between July 2016 and July 2021 which totaled around $460M.

• During that time period, 88% of the dollars from these contracts were utilized by firms owned by white men. Meaning that of the total $460M, only $55M (12%) were utilized to firms owned by white women or people of color.

• The survey found that there were significant disparities in contracting with Black-owned businesses and Native American owned businesses.

Council voted to move the matter to the new General Government and Planning Committee in January 2023. At that time, they will discuss ways to implement the study’s recommendations, and likely come up with their own strategies for closing the existing contract disparities in Lexington.

If you are interested in learning more about this issue, you can download the packet with the presentation here.