St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer paused the city’s Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise program Monday, citing federal pressures to end gender- and race-based programming nationwide.
Through this move, the city's business certification program will no longer accept new construction contracts with minority-owned or women-led goals. Existing contracts will not be discontinued to avoid placing legal risks on developers, contractors and subcontractors.
St. Louis officials are fighting to secure federal funding to help with tornado recovery, and being out of compliance with the Trump administration could jeopardize the funding, said Spencer.
“We have some discretionary allocations from FEMA. We have discretionary allocations from Community Development Block Grant funds. We have debris removal and a whole host of other things that we are looking to the federal government to provide us and to provide our residents to get through this exceptionally trying time,” she said. “If we don't get these funds, I don't see how we're going to be able to rebuild our community.”
She added that she understands she is being scrutinized for capitulating to the Trump administration's threats. Spencer said she is not choosing money over residents.
“I'm threading the needle to try to be as protective of our community as possible and to enable as much federal aid to our victims of the tornado that we can possibly get,” she said.
The city received a letter from the U.S. attorney general’s office and the Department of Transportation, which officials said concerned them and pushed them to make the change.
The city recently hired Griffin & Strong, an Atlanta consulting firm, to review the city's results from disparity studies and examine best contract inclusion practices from around the country.
“The issue is that we need to understand where we are, what the best practices are, and what are the recommendations that we need to have going forward,” said Otis Williams, president of the St. Louis Development Corporation.
Board of Aldermen President Megan Green posted on Sunday to her personal Facebook account comments about Spencer’s decision. She said the board was in the process of updating the minority contracting program ordinance when it received a notice that the program was paused.
“We’re living through a moment of aggressive rollbacks of programs our communities fought hard to build. And we’re being forced to choose between complying with Trump or standing on the right side of history,” Green said. “Our office is actively working with minority contractors and the administration to craft a new ordinance that both addresses the disparities and can survive legal scrutiny.”
Spencer, city officials, aldermen and community members will be working to create a bill on construction contracts that could be made law by mid-September.
Spencer said the city has diversity goals because it needs them.
“We know that we have disparities in the wealth and the business community, in the contracting community. I, as mayor, want to remedy these,” she said.
