Wilkerson v Chang-Diaz

Wilkerson's Phone Buddies

McCain's Super Powers?

2 Comments

• shirley kressel said:

  David, what did this legislation (Chapter 193, Acts of 2004) actually accomplish, do you know?  According to what I could find, it changed the regulations for certain public-works contracts.  It did include some good reforms, but also some problematic ones.  And it set minority/women-owned contractor percentage targets for those projects.

  One of the problematic provision of Ch. 193 opened the door for big-ticket state-assisted municipal road-works to be built via "design/build" contracts, a controversial method of contracting that bypasses fair competitive bidding and lets the same company do the design and the construction, thus removing the checks and balances between project designers (interested in design protection and quality control) and construction companies (interested in finishing job spending least time and money). The public agency loses an advocate for its approved design requirements during the construction process, and has less control under design/build than under traditional processes of hiring independent designer/engineer, bidding out the work, and having the designer monitor to be sure the approved design is being constructed. I believe the Big Dig had some design-build elements with Bechtel.  And the Route 3 highway widening was all design-build; it was completed late, and I recall seeing a newspaper report of cost over-runs, although I cannot just now find that report.  You might do a follow-up to check out the design/build experience in Mass. and other states; it has not been uniformly successful -- and since design flaws can more easily be hidden by the constructor, problems may not show up for a while, and liability often can't be clearly assigned.

  Chapter 193 also allows a designer who conducts a feasibility study for a project to continue with the design of the project without mandatory peer review, creating possible conflicts of interest.

  As to the minority/women contractor participation, which I assume was Sen. Wilkerson's purpose for participating, the law created an Affirmative Marketing Program setting targets of about 8% for minority- and 4% for women-owned business participation. Although annual reports are mandated, the State House clerks had in their files only one report, for 2006; it showed 4.86% minority and 2.2% women participation, or about half of the targets. And some municipalities are still unaware of the law's requirements for the Program.

  But even without Ch. 193,  the City of Boston requires, on its contracts, labor-force participation of 25% minority and 5% women, higher than the targets Ch. 193 set.  And until it was discontinued in 2003 (for liability reasons), the City of Boston MWBE Program required City departments to make best-faith efforts to contract a minimum of 15 percent of their business with certified minority business enterprises (MBEs) and 5 percent with certified women's business enterprises (WBEs) (although I don't know the actual compliance levels).  So the Ch. 193 targets are lower than the old City of Boston targets, and actual compliance is half of the targets.

  The State Office of Minority and Women Business Assistance (SOMWBA) office has no municipal statistics on minority/women participation before Ch. 193 was passed, so we can't tell if the levels have been improved by the law.  Maybe some other reader of this blog can provide more information that would help evaluate the true impact of Ch. 193 on minority/women participation in state-funded works.

  Since the minority set-asides were presumably the trade for the loosening of quality control in the contracting regulations, it is quite possible, given our already deplorable quality-control and procurement integrity processes, that the deal did the state's taxpayers more harm than the participation targets did the under-represented businesses good.

  Maybe you can now write the story you didn't write before, using the state's actual experience under the 2004 law to determine whether Sen. Wilkerson can claim her role in the Construction Reform Act a victory for either the state or for her minority constituents.

  But in your post, you have already confirmed that it was, in any case, a victory for Wilkerson, when your wrote, "So, cynic that I am, I guessed that she wanted to line her campaign coffers with the inevitable contributions form those stakeholders (which she did in fact receive), and that in the end she would protect them and sell out the constituents, by producing weak reform, bad reform, or no reform."

  September 13, 2008 10:37 AM

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