Data shows Santa Clara County seldom awards contracts to minority businesses
SAN JOSE, Calif. - A new study commissioned by Santa Clara County shows that only a small portion of government contracts are awarded to minority business owners.
Leaders in the minority business community say the data only proves what they’ve been saying for years: minority business owners are being ignored and left out and that has to change.
"All these tax dollars are being paid by women, mid-sized minority-owned businesses that are not having the opportunity to have access to these major county contracts," said Walter Wilson, Co-Founder of the Minority Business Consortium of Silicon Valley.
Wilson says the lack of business opportunity in the county for African American business owners shows stark disparities.
"Black contracting in this county is dismal. Black people are leaving this county in large numbers, primarily because they don’t feel at home. They don’t feel like they belong. Belonging is important these days and guess what, in the last five years, 13,000 people have left this county. Ten thousand of them were African or African ancestry people," said Wilson.
Santa Clara County’s recently released Vendor Disparity Study shows the county spent more than $2.4 billion on contracts between July 2016 and June 2022. Fifteen percent of those funds went to minority-owned businesses including non-minority women, with less than 1% going to African American, Hispanic, and Native American business owners.
"There are many Latinos that are very much part of the workforce, but they’re not part of the ownership. We know that in terms of wealth creation for this generation and the generations to come, you need both. Clearly there’s been some exclusion of that side," said Dennis King, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Silicon Valley
Both Wilson and King say now that county leaders have data that backs up their claims of business discrimination and exclusion, it’s time for Santa Clara County to make some drastic changes.
"I think we have the right people at the Board of Supervisors right now, who are willing to take a look at this and say this has to be fixed. The fact that they asked for the disparity study says that they knew something was wrong," said Wilson.
KTVU reached the President of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, Susan Ellenberg, but she was unavailable for comment.