By now it shouldn’t be this hard.
Yet every time this region starts to build something big, it first has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to ensuring equal opportunity for minority and other marginalized groups.
You’d think that after reconstructing the city’s schools, remaking the waterfront and creating the medical campus, we’d know how to build a diverse contractor industry and workforce along with the physical structures. After all, where there’s a will, there’s a way.
But maybe that’s the problem.
For all that was supposed to have changed after the 5/14 racist massacre at the Tops supermarket opened many eyes to the effects of inequity, maybe the will to share the economic pie still isn’t there.
Representatives with the Bills and with the project construction manager say that only a small fraction of all the bid packages have been released, and even fewer have been awarded.
How else to explain Empire State Development’s finding that, through early June, the hiring of minority, women and service-disabled veteran-owned businesses to work on the $1.54 billion Buffalo Bills stadium was “well below” expectations?
The Bills and the Gilbane/Turner construction management team that’s overseeing the work both said it’s early in the…
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