Less Than 1% of Santa Clara County Contracts Go to Black and Latino Businesses, Study Shows

If you had asked Walter Wilson to tell you whether Santa Clara County does a good job of spreading its many lucrative contracts out to a diverse set of businesses, he’d have given you a short and simple answer: No. “This is a huge crisis,” Wilson said. Wilson, a co-founder of the Minority Business Consortium and longtime advocate for equity, said he’s been pushing the county to diversify its contracting base for more than a decade, even taking on an analysis of their procurement strategies in the past to help highlight the problems. However, a recently completed study, more than two years in the making, shows what Wilson said he and many others already knew: Santa Clara County only awards a small sliver of its contracts to businesses owned by people of diverse backgrounds and women. The $500,000 study, by consultant MGT, examined $2.4 billion worth of contracts the county awarded from July 2016 through June 2021 in various industries, such as construction, information technology, laundry, landscaping and equipment purchases. Just over 15% of those contracts went to what the county calls diverse business enterprises, which are firms owned and controlled by Black people/African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native...