The State of Minority- and Women- Owned ... - Cleveland.com

Anecdotal Evidence of Disparities in the City of Cleveland’s Market Area
[To reduce the barrier to bonding, the City should say] we’re going to accept your bid,
but before you can perform this job you got to hand us a performance bond.… Now I
have the [award]. I go to a bonding company, the bonding company’s going to check me
out. If they’re not going to give me the bond I can’t do the job. So all it does is fall to the
next person.
Our Mayor made it where $500,000 and under you don’t need a performance bond. It’s
those kind of initiatives that we need.
That Cleveland requires bonding on contracts beyond construction projects was noted by several
firm owners as a special and unnecessary barrier.
The City of Cleveland requires a bid bond, a performance bond that you need just to
submit the bid [for commodities]. And like this gentleman said, if you had it when it
came time to perform it there’d be no problem because then you would have the contract.
The State doesn’t do that. It, it just boggles my mind how the City would do it but the
State doesn’t do it.
D. Conclusion
The anecdotal interview information strongly suggests that M/WBEs across many industries
continue to suffer discriminatory barriers to full and fair access to the City of Cleveland’s prime
contracts and associated subcontracts and private sector opportunities. This evidence includes the
continued existence of discriminatory attitudes and perceptions of minority and women
incompetence; exclusion from industry and information networks; barriers to obtaining public
sector contracts; barriers to obtaining work as prime vendors; and barriers to obtaining surety
bonding. These results are the type of anecdotal evidence that, in conjunction with statistical
evidence, the courts have found to be highly probative of whether the City would be a passive
participant in a discriminatory market area without affirmative interventions and whether race-
and gender-conscious remedies are necessary to address that discrimination.
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