Florida Governor Rick Scott’s administration isn’t making it easy to track the amount of Black business being done with the state of Florida.
In an effort to report on the amount of state goods and services provided by Black businesses over the past three Florida gubernatorial administrations, the Florida Courier has learned that the current administration has made it difficult to get those numbers since Scott took office in 2011.
Lumped together
In the past, the information was readily available online through the state’s Office of Supplier Diversity (OSD).
Under Florida law, the Department of Management Service is required to “record and measure the use of certified minority business enterprises (MBEs) in state contracting,” according to OSD’s annual reports.
MBEs are designated as African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, or Native American, and must be 51-percent owned, managed, or controlled by someone in one of these categories. The state also added service-disabled veteran-owned businesses as another separate designation.
Such businesses can have a net worth of not more than $5 million, employ less than 200 full-time employees, or be recognized as certified by the federal government.
For years, it was easy to determine just how much money was spent with Black businesses and other minority groups as separate entities. OSD’s website lists annual reports dating from 1999 (with the exception of an incomplete report in 2001) that gives exact amounts broken out by four expense categories: construction, architects and engineers, commodities, and contractual services.
The information was then divided by type of majority ownership: women, African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, Native American.
Today, the minority groups are lumped together, making it impossible to ascertain how much Scott’s administration has spent specifically with Black-owned businesses.
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