After targets reduced, calls for more diversity at Buffalo Billion site
Public officials, clergy members, community organizers and citizens stood in front of the massive construction site at the state-funded Riverbend project in Buffalo on Friday and demanded that Gov. Andrew Cuomo boost diversity hiring goals at the nearly $1 billion project.
With dump trucks rattling by, and between chants of “What do we want? Jobs. When do we want them? Now,” a series of speakers decried the site’s 15 percent minority and 5 percent women hiring goals – negotiated by the contractor LPCiminelli and the Buffalo Building Trades Council as part of the project labor agreement - criticizing the numbers. The numbers, which are lower than the 25 percent minority and 5 percent female goals trumpeted by the governor when the land deal was announced, are far too small in a city where minorities make up about half the population, the speakers said.
Erie County Legislator Betty Jean Grant, a rally organizer, said she wants the original numbers restored and an independent monitor installed to ensure that diversity hiring figures at the site are accurately reported.
Grant called on citizens to call the offices of Cuomo and other elected officials to pressure them into making the proposed changes.
“This place is not monitored by anybody right now, the city, the county or the state,” Grant said. “It’s not being monitored by anybody but the developer himself.”
People United for Sustainable Housing Buffalo, Citizen Action Organization Buffalo and other community groups have been driving the conversation around the massive public investments being made in the city as part of Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion initiative and what can be done to ensure that minorities and people living in poverty will benefit from the cash infusion. The groups held several meetings on the topic over the summer.
Politicians began to take notice and Cuomo, Mayor Byron Brown and other state and county elected officials now include a line about the money creating opportunity for everyone in the city whenever they make speeches about the state-funded economic development initiative.
Those pledges were called into question late last month when Investigative Post reported that the numbers agreed to in the oroject labor agreement for the Riverbend site were lower than the numbers outlined in the land sale agreement with the city.
In addition, numbers provided to the news outlet through a Freedom of Information Law request showed that diversity hiring at the site for October 2014 through March 2015 were failing to meet even the less ambitious 15 percent goal.
Since then, Brown signed a diversity pledge earlier this week with Open Buffalo, an economic justice coalition. He then held a press conference to announce that the numbers through July, released by Empire State Development that day, showed diversity hiring goals at the site exceeding levels agreed to in the project labor agreement, with 18 percent minority and 5 percent women workforce in the month of July and 16 percent minority and 6 percent women for the entirety of the project.
Empire State Development on Thursday sent out a workforce participation fact sheet that outlined the new numbers, emphasized that by law any diversity hiring goals are not enforceable, and touted Cuomo’s record on raising the goals for state funded projects for minority and woman owned businesses participation from 10 percent to 30 percent. The release also seemingly took a jab at the Investigative Post report, writing that any report suggesting that diversity hiring goals at the site were not being met were “false and misleading.”
At the rally, some speakers said that they would bring the same message to other projects receiving state help.
Charley Fisher III is president of the board for B.U.I.L.D. Buffalo, an organization that works to unite members of the black community and other ethnic communities in Western New York. He said his group also plans to take the fight to the Erie County Industrial Development Agency and will push to have diversity hiring goals of 25 percent minority and 5 percent women for any project subsidized by the IDA.
Fisher said that regardless of how the project goals were set, diversity hiring at the site falls short of the city’s set number of 25 percent minority and 5 percent women and is a blow to progress made on other publicly funded projects, like the Buffalo schools capital plan, where similar goals have been set and achieved.
“We don’t want to go backwards,” Fisher said. “We want to go forward and that’s why we’re demanding a meeting with the governor.”
View the Empire State Development fact sheet and diversity figures below.