Bailouts: Will Minorities Get Enough Out of the Economic Stimulus?

[bobbyw24]

By TIM PADGETT / MIAMI Tim Padgett / Miami – Mon Nov 23, 10:10 am ET

Miami's poorer residents have long complained that the city's meager public-transit system makes it harder for them to get to work. So when the Obama Administration announced the $787 billion stimulus plan earlier this year, many hoped some of that money would help fund plans like an expansion of Miami's undersized Metrorail system - especially a 10-mile northern extension that would reach into predominantly African-American and other minority communities largely cut off from downtown and other employment centers. But the project, in part because it's not considered as shovel-ready as jobs like existing highway maintenance, isn't getting any of the $15 billion in stimulus aid for Florida, and has been shelved for the time being.

To Gihan Perera, that's just one example of how federal and state governments are missing a great opportunity to use the stimulus to aid the poor and minority communities hardest hit by the Great Recession. Perera, director of the nonprofit Miami Workers Center (MWC), is among a number of antipoverty activists closely examining which communities and contractors are getting stimulus dollars, and so far he says the picture doesn't look bright for already marginalized "low-opportunity" zones and minority-owned firms. The lion's share of road and other construction work in Florida has gone to venues like airports and new highways that usually benefit more affluent suburbs, Perera argues. And as of September, less than 10% of the $330 million in stimulus projects awarded directly from federal agencies to Florida-based contractors had gone to minority-owned firms, according to a study by the MWC, the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University and the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy (RISEP) at Miami's Florida International University. In all, black-owned firms received less than 2%. "The fear," says Perera, "is that the stimulus money could instead serve to exacerbate the inequalities that existed before." (See which businesses are bucking the recession.)

That's not just a concern for the Sunshine State, which now has one of the nation's highest jobless and home-foreclosure rates. Earlier this year, the Associated Press found that across the U.S., the stimulus plan was "set to spend 50% more per person in areas with the lowest unemployment than it will in communities with the highest." In Illinois, President Obama's home state, a Chicago Public Radio investigation this fall found that less than 10% of the Department of Transportation's stimulus contracts had gone to "disadvantaged business enterprises," or DBEs, even though the state says it benchmarked almost a quarter of the dollars for those minority- and women-owned firms. Less than 2% of it had gone to black-owned businesses. Florida's Department of Transport doesn't have a specific DBE participation target for stimulus-related projects, but it says it exceeded its goal of more than 8% for all federally funded (not just stimulus) work in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Still, given that Florida's workforce is about one-third minority, watchdogs like the MWC suggest the target should be higher.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/2009112...08599194033800