2020 In Review: The Story Behind 'The Color Of Public Money'

In the news business, we always hope our stories have an impact, but it's not often our stories lead the governor to create a new state agency to fix a problem we revealed. But that's what the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting achieved in 2020. Editor Paul Singer spoke with GBH's All Things Considered Host Arun Rath to explain what happened. The transcript below has been edited for clarity.

Arun Rath: So we've talked a few times about the series The Color of Public Money, which has some pretty breathtaking reporting. Why don't you remind us — take us back to how this got started.

Paul Singer: It started with me recruiting the group of BU students — a bunch of computer science students — they helped us scrape and analyze a database of government contracts going back about 10 years. And they managed to capture 13,000 contracts where we could identify the company that received the work. So then once we had it, we said, well, how many of these companies are minority-owned businesses? And the answer stunned us. It was fewer than 250. So my colleague Chris Burrell took the story from there. He started talking to black contractors and he spoke, for instance, with one contractor named Calvin Branford, who said minority businesses face a fundamental hurdle getting government contracts.

Clip of Calvin Branford: It's not easy at all. I mean, it's it's old boys' network as far as most of the work that goes on. So it's a real challenge, even though the work's out there is very challenging to get it.

Singer: And Chris discovered in his reporting that not only were minority firms not getting the government contracts, but the value of contracts they were getting had declined over the past two decades. So in 1998, the state reports spending $359 million. You adjust that for inflation, it's about $550 million. But in 2018, Massachusetts only reported spending $429 million. And that number, it turns out, wasn't true.

Rath: Wow. So the state number wasn't wasn't true and you guys did the math to show that wasn't the case?

Singer: That state number was not true. They issue these annual reports on how much each agency spends with minority-owned businesses. And it took us months, but we went through these reports and figured out that in 2016, they had changed the way they count with the express intent of boosting their results. So, like, they used to take credit only for direct contracts state agencies signed with minority-owned businesses. Right. Makes sense. After 2016, they started including any payments made by a state contractor to a minority business.

So if a white contractor hires a Hispanic window washer for their headquarters office, that counts. If the white contractor had a black caterer for their holiday office party, that counts. And in some cases, the state took the credit, even if white contractors made a donation to a minority-run nonprofit.

Rath: Wow. So talk about the impact, how much of an impact that had on the state's numbers?

Singer: It was huge. It was, annually, it was as much as 30 percent of the total. So as I said, the $429 million the state claimed in 2018, only about $280 million of that was money that was actually spent by the state. The rest of it was this third-party, funny money.

Rath: So let's talk about how this reverberated, because it wasn't a case of the governor reads the story and says, all right, well, we'll fix this.

Singer: No, no, it was not. He made a couple of very few public comments where he basically said we were wrong, his administration has been raising the number of minority contracts every year. But he was also coming under enormous pressure from minority business groups and even his own Black Advisory Commission to address the findings. So in February, they first created a new mandate to increase minority participation in state construction contracts. But then in November, the day before the November election, he announced that he's elevating the office that manages minority contracting to a stand alone agency. That gives it a much greater authority to force other agencies to hire businesses of color and to basically get the numbers right. He also at that point announced that they were going to start separating the spending counting between the direct spending by the state and the third-party spending.

Rath: Wow. So, I mean, it's just kind of kind of amazing to watch this unfold. So singer at this point, you know, do we retire the jersey of the Color of Public Money? Are you done?

Singer: No, we're not done at all. Governors have been saying for decades that they want to do more to expand minority contracting and it still doesn't happen. Right? So we're continuing to dig into the question, why not? Why doesn't it happen? Why, as our colleague Phillip Martin found out, hasn't the Steamship Authority hired a black-owned business in at least five years? Why, as our colleague Kirk Carapella and the education team found out, do universities across the state have an average minority contracting rate of somewhere around two percent? It's not just about government agencies, this is about structural racism. And we are committed to continuing to explore and expose it. That's going to be our theme going into 2021, just like it was in 2020.

Rath: Yeah. I mean, I guess the lesson is that creating an agency doesn't necessarily solve a problem.

Singer: Absolutely not. You can. You can. Who knows whether they'll actually do what they're supposed to do. That's what we're there for, to make sure they do.