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Minority contracting data overstated
By DIANE RADO © St. Petersburg Times, published October 27, 2000 TALLAHASSEE -- For the past several months, Gov. Jeb Bush and his administration have been boasting about numbers that show state minority contracting is up dramatically after Bush used his bully pulpit to encourage agencies to steer business to blacks, women and Hispanics. It turns out some of the numbers are wrong. On Thursday evening, Bush's staff was scrambling to put together a new, less flattering picture of state minority contracting after acknowledging to the St. Petersburg Times several errors that overstated successes in minority outreach efforts. Bush's office released figures this summer showing that minority business spending statewide was up by nearly 58 percent since last year. The numbers were up 91 percent for the 15 agencies under the governor's control. They increased less dramatically for those agencies that don't report directly to the governor. But figures from the state's Office of Supplier Diversity, which oversees Bush's "One Florida" effort to increase minority business, paint a different picture. That office shows a statewide increase in minority spending of 46 percent rather than 58 percent, an increase of about 88 percent for Bush's agencies and declines in spending for agencies that don't report to the governor. For example, Bush's office had reported a 5.9 percent increase in minority spending for agencies reporting to both the governor and Cabinet, as well as Florida's public universities. The Office of Supplier Diversity's figures show a decline in minority spending of about 9 percent for those same agencies. Asked about the discrepancy, Bush's staff acknowledged a series of mistakes in their own numbers, including overstating figures for Florida's departments of Management Services and Education for the 1999-2000 fiscal year, and failing to report more than $1-million of minority business spending at the state Board of Administration in the 1998-99 fiscal year. In addition, their numbers on state university minority business spending differ from the Office of Supplier Diversity. The errors involved oversights or miscommunication and were not intentional, said Frank Jimenez, Bush's acting general counsel and deputy chief of staff. "This is the first year that One Florida has been implemented. We're moving from an old system to a new system. It is impossible to do so seamlessly and fluidly and perfectly," Jimenez said. Bush put in place One Florida last November as a way to end quotas and others methods of affirmative action but still increase minority contracting with the state. His executive order covers only agencies under his control, and his staff noted that despite their errors, the governor's agencies still show outstanding success in increasing minority spending. "Never before has this state seen a one-year increase of this magnitude," Jimenez said. But some of that success may be the result of number-crunching rather than real progress, the Times has found. This week, the Agency for Health Care Administration was recognized at the Governor and Cabinet meeting for doing nearly five times more business with minority firms in 1999-2000 than 1998-1999. But the agency, as well as Windell Paige, executive director of the Office of Supplier Diversity, acknowledged to the Times this week that the increase was largely due to a different way of calculating minority business dollars. This year, the agency kept track of the minority firms that subcontract with the state's program to distribute Medicaid dollars. State dollars given to the minority firms were added to agency's minority spending figures for 1999-2000, creating a phenomenal increase from last year, when those dollars weren't added in. The Department of Health also had a big increase in minority spending, from $9.3-million in 1998-99 to $20.5-million for 1999-2000. But $6.8-million of the increase stemmed from a contract signed June 14 -- two weeks before the end of the fiscal year -- to build a new county health department in Sarasota County. The project will take at least two years, but the Health Department took credit for all the dollars in its 1999-2000 figures, which made the agency's minority spending dollars look good this year. Tom Arnold, head of the department's division of administration, said that kind of accounting is permissible, though not all agencies do it. The Juvenile Justice Department, for example, told the Times that it does not count all dollars in a multiyear contract in one year. Paige, of the Office of Supplier Diversity, also acknowledged that it is difficult to track just how much minority firms are actually getting from the state. That is because some state agencies are using minority firms only as middlemen for certain purchases, such as computers. The state credits the minority firm with the total sale, but the firm actually gets only a small percentage of the deal. Take Robert and Terry Castro, the president and vice president of American Data & Computer Products Inc. in Tampa. As middlemen for computer giants such as Dell, the Castros have been doing a brisk business with the state since Bush's One Florida plan went into place. They were recognized this week at the governor and Cabinet meeting for donating some of their new profits to local schools. But the Castros say they send 99 percent of the money from their computer sales back to Dell -- even though the state credits their company with the sale. That is standard business reporting, the Castros say. But people shouldn't think they're making millions. They probably earned about $110,000 last year after selling about $9-million in computers to the state, Terry Castro said. "The numbers (reported by the state) sound good," she said. "But when you get down to gross profit, it's like, wow, what a difference."
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From the Times state desk
From the state wire
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