local news
Babies
continued from page 1
Hill Park, NE 37th Avenue and Ainsworth.
The free event will feature: 15-minute mas-
sages, henna, baby wearing demonstrations
and more.
african american babies are at a
Higher risk of Death
At the moment, Black and Native
American babies born in Multnomah
County, Oregon, are twice as likely to die in
their first year
as
White
babies.
But
that’s not all.
Black babies
are
almost
twice as likely
to be born
underweight as
White babies.
They are more
than two and a half times as likely to have a
teen mom. And they are less likely to be
breastfed, a known protective factor.
“We need women of color to be doulas in
our community,” Monroe says. “If we can
find a way for the state to pay for doulas,
then this would make a great difference.”
If Portland’s African American and
Native American babies were a country,
they would rank 49th in the world for infant
mortality, sandwiched between Martinique
and Bahrain. The United States as a whole
ranks at number 34, right behind Cuba. But
it’s not just babies who are at risk, it’s also
mothers.
A
2010 report by
A m n e s t y
International,
‘ D e a d l y
Delivery’
noted that the
USA is a more
dangerous
place
for
women to give
birth than 49 other countries. And African
American women are four times more like-
ly to die in childbirth than White moms.
Black and Native American
babies born in Multnomah
County, Oregon, are twice as
likely to die in their first year as
White babies
See babIES on page 6
utilities
continued from page 1
increases, budget expenditures and financial
plans.
Saltzman’s office manages the Bureau of
Environmental Services, which handles
sewer services. The water bureau’s adminis-
trator David Shaff did not return a request
for comment by press time.
Mayor Adams Communications Director
Amy Ruiz, said Adams is supportive of the
matter. Currently, it is Adams’ office that
reviews rate and policy changes and makes
recommendations to the council for
approval.
During the 2004 city council race, candi-
date Adams wrote that the decision of utili-
ty rates shouldn’t be decided in a single
commissioner’s office.
“Because of the specialization of their
services, their size and complexity, a single
Commissioner-in-Charge and the five mem-
bers of the City Council cannot adequately
provide oversight to the City’s $1.4 billion
utility operations,” he wrote. “Much like the
State Public Utility Commission, I propose
appointing a seven-member City of
Portland Utility Board (folks with expertise
on utility and environmental issues) that
would be empowered with some independ-
ent operational authority over the Water and
Environmental Services bureaus, unless
overruled by a vote of the Portland City
Council.”
procurement officer to sign off on all pre-
qualification requests.
nesses hired to help on the study. Her job
was collecting community testimony about
local companies’ experiences in trying to
win city contracts for public works projects.
“I interviewed a number of people in the
Portland metropolitan area, and there actu-
ally was in my view clear discrimination
found,” she said.
“However working with the numbers,
BBC – it all depends on your compilation of
them, what you’re pulling together and
what you look at, to come up with the per-
centages and the numbers that they did,”
Burch said.
“No question there was quite a lot of crit-
icism of the methodology,” Blackwood
said.
it back to their communities while at the
same time stripping our community,” she
says. “I look at some of the gyms up and
down Martin Luther King, all the housing,
all the projects that we were not able to par-
ticipate in, have public dollars associated
with them.”
“When African Americans and other
minorities approach lending institutions –
the traditional approaches to getting capital,
to getting work — you’re always shut
down, you don’t have collateral, you have
credit issues that preclude you. You didn’t
get the job because you weren’t low bid –
there’s always an institutional reason why
you are excluded.
“And then when AA and other minorities
tried to get engaged and wanted to buy
property or redevelop their own property on
Williams Avenue, they were shut down by
the institutions,” Jones said. “That’s why
the term is ‘institutional racism’ – because
when we try to walk through the path we’re
told to walk through, we don’t get that
opportunity.”
Business owner James Posey, who has
agitated city officials on the issue for almost
30 years, says the very foundations of the
Black community are at stake.
“I don’t think you can ignore the issues
about the gentrification, the issues around
employment, the housing – all these issues
converge when you’re talking about the
absence of economic equity for minorities
in our city,” he said.
“As far as I’m concerned, the best gang-
prevention program is a job — but there is
no vehicle in place to be sure they incen-
tivize an individual such as myself who is
dedicated to hiring young people and put-
ting them in the workforce in a productive
way,” Posey said.
Construction
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to the draft study, prepared by BBC
Consulting of Colorado, which at first
downplayed evidence of discrimination in
how the city pays construction companies to
build local infrastructure.
BBC’s study, which took two years to
complete and is the first such analysis since
1995, is actually two separate studies look-
ing at how construction contracts were
awarded from 2004-2009 – one evaluating
the city’s practices, the other focusing on
the Portland Development Commission.
Four ‘Immediate actions’ Proposed
Blackwood said in revamping the dispari-
ty study, Commissioner Fish – placed in
charge of the process by Mayor Adams –
focused on immediate, easy-to-implement
action items as well as requiring sugges-
tions for longer-term programs and policies
before the end of next year.
The commissioners’ resolution requires
these four items be undertaken immediate-
ly:
— Better outreach by the city to minority
and women-owned businesses, including
quarterly events, more online notifications
of available contracts, and more assistance
in outreach for general contractors;
— An effort at forecasting upcoming
opportunities that includes closer communi-
cation between city staff and under-served
communities of contractors;
— Fazing out the Sheltered Market
Program currently used to serve minority,
women and emerging small businesses and
graduating all companies out of it as soon as
possible; and creating “an improved and
strengthened program to replace it;”
— Raising the limit on job bond require-
ments now included in the “Contractor
Prequalification Program” from $200,000
to $250,000, and requiring the city’s chief
Public criticism
Blackwood said that a high tide of com-
ments from the National Association of
Minority Contractors of Oregon, the
Oregon
Association
of
Minority
Entrepreneurs, and the minority Chambers
of Commerce, underscored BBC’s heavy
reliance on statistics that, critics said, mini-
mized the generations-old issue of city dol-
lars going to primarily white-owned con-
struction companies for taxpayer-funded
projects.
Released in early April, the draft study
results were put out for public comment for
a month – during which the city heard an
‘Walk Down the Street’
‘As far as I’m concerned, the best gang-
prevention program is a job’
--James Posey
earful about BBC’s conclusion that Portland
is doing a good job in awarding construc-
tion contracts to women and minority busi-
nesses.
“From 2004 to 2009 the City of Portland
awarded $900 million in contracts,” said
Tony Jones, executive director of the
Metropolitan Contractor Improvement
Partnership. “Only $26 million went to
minorities, 2.91 percent; to African
Americans, .48 percent,” he said. “One
would think that with $900 million you
could do a lot of good.”
Local consultant Faye Burch runs one of
the four women and minority-owned busi-
Burch, who has worked closely with the
construction industry for decades, says all
you have to do is walk down the street to
see the long-term impact of city contracting
policies.
“Let’s take Williams Avenue, for exam-
ple,” she said. “That was predominantly a
Black business district. From Left Bank all
the way up Williams Avenue, that business
district has been stripped from that commu-
nity, it has not been replaced with any Black
ownership, there has not been any participa-
tion by any businesses that wanted to par-
ticipate on those projects.
“Builders created their own wealth, took
June 22, 2011 The Portland Skanner Page 3