In November, Bush signed an executive order that largely put a halt to Florida's set-aside program, which had reserved as much as 50 percent of state contracting dollars in certain areas for minority- and female-owned businesses. In place of specific race or gender goals, he pledged to make the state more aggressive about seeking out minorities to do business with. The approach, however, opens up an argument: Are numerical targets necessary to accomplish the aims of affirmative action? Or can they be accomplished through proactive management focused on diversity?
To get his new program rolling, Bush appointed a new head of the Office of Minority Business Advocacy and Assistance, and asked him to play matchmaker. It is his responsibility, in other words, to hook up state agencies with qualified minority-owned businesses.
The new networker-in-chief, Windell Paige, says his office must be decentralized out of Tallahassee so it can tap into the large pool of minority businesses around the state, especially in south Florida. "I'm going to do a lot of reprioritizing," Paige says, "to take us out of our cubbyholes, and put us out into the field."
Another big part of Bush's plan, some of which the state legislature would have to approve when it meets in March, involves management over the state's hierarchy of purchasing officials. Bush wants key procurement officers reclassified out of the civil service so that they serve at the pleasure of the governor. The move, Bush says, will increase scrutiny over the procurement process and allow him to hold individuals directly accountable for their contracting decisions.
Critics argue that without numerical targets, agencies will lapse into the same discrimination against minority businesses that made targets necessary in the first place. And making purchasers essentially political appointees, they say, could open procurement to political pressure and favoritism. "It seems to me that he's taking away measurable objectives, and saying `Just trust me, I'll increase the amount of business being done with minorities,'" says Leon Russell, the former head of the state NAACP. "When you don't have targets, then you don't have a way of getting to where you supposedly want to be."
Bush's move comes at a time when minority set-asides at the state and local levels are increasingly under fire both in the courts and at the ballot box. Since the U.S. Supreme Court's 1989 decision in City of Richmond v. Croson, places such as Detroit, Philadelphia and Miami- Dade County, Florida, have been forced to drop race and gender preferences in contracting. Instead, some are trying more neutral approaches based on business size or location, hoping to build a diverse business community in a more roundabout way.
Meanwhile, successful ballot drives led by anti-affirmative action activists have largely ended minority set-asides in California and Washington. It was when the same activists turned their sights--and ballot drives--on Florida that Bush made his move. Supporters of the Florida ballot drive praised Bush's plan but said it didn't go far enough, since it leaves local set-aside laws intact. They continue collecting signatures, and promise that a constitutional amendment to end all race and gender preferences in Florida will win in the November election, as long as the state Supreme Court approves the ballot language.
If the experience in the state of Washington, which passed its initiative in 1998, is any guide, an anti-affirmative action win would bode poorly for Florida's minority-owned businesses. In the fiscal year before Washington's initiative took effect, the state awarded 7.2 percent of its publicly bid contracts to minority-owned firms. The following year, during which the initiative was in effect for only six months, awards fell to just 3.1 percent.
