The unredacted draft report of Shelby County’s disparity study was made available online Wednesday following a vote by the County Commission to release the document to the public.
It is available on the County Commission’s page at shelbycountytn.gov.
The 10-0 vote in a special called commission meeting was necessary because the consulting firm that conducted the study, Mason Tillman Associates, was hired as special legal counsel to the commission, making the document privileged information, said Ross Dyer, county attorney.
The commission received the draft of the final report on March 28 but, based on advice from Dyer, did not release it.
The Commercial Appeal filed an open records request for the document and the commission was also called out on WREG-TV’s show “Informed Sources” for its failure to release the report.
Commission chairman Terry Roland took issue with the implication that the commission did not act with transparency.
“At the end of the day I won’t do what the press wants me to do anyway. At the end of the day I’m going to do what the voters want me to do,” Roland said.
No one from the public, he said, has contacted him about the report.
He also advised that because the document was a draft, some information could change.
Before the report could be released, the resolution had to be signed by county Mayor Mark Luttrell.
A preliminary presentation on the study, made in February, noted that businesses owned by white men received 88.32 percent of the contract dollars awarded by county government between 2012 and 2014, or $168.2 million of the total $190.5 million that was spent.
Businesses owned by African-Americans received 5.8 percent of the county’s contract dollars or $11 million, with those owned by white women receiving 5.15 percent or $9.8 million during that same period.
It also found that 55 percent of contracts are fulfilled by businesses outside of the county, another concern for Commissioner Mark Billingsley.
“As much as I want to champion better diversity in the way we do business, I want us to spend our monies in Shelby County. We should work overtime to be sure we’re helping our own,” Billingsley said.
Shelby County lost a lawsuit in 1993 over its purchasing policies and as a result rewrote its procedures. The legal decision also required the county to conduct a disparity study before the policies could be modified.
Roland has seated an ad hoc committee, which includes members of the business community, to review current purchasing policies and make recommendations on necessary changes.
By: Linda A. Moore/The Commercial Appeal
