CLEVELAND, Ohio — About 14 years ago, Shakorie Davis started Next Generation Construction. He said he learned at an early age about the importance of representation in the trade.
“There was a school being built across the street and I went to that school. It was Miles Park. It was in the Union Miles area, which we are talking about the southeast side,” said Davis. “I remember looking over there at that building being built and nobody looked like me.”
Now decades later, his own company located near 40th and Carnegie in Cleveland leads several projects.
“When we're doing business inside of the community, we want to leave the community in a better shape than it was before we actually got there," said Davis.
But Davis said often he has noticed minority-owned businesses don’t always have a seat at the table for some of the large local projects, Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin said he has noticed also.
“We get calls all the time, especially people of color who feel like they don’t have an opportunity to participate on a lot of these," said Griffin.
City leaders said from 2014 to 2018 of the $1.1 billion dollars in Cuyahoga County prime contract spending, just over four percent was awarded to minority and women-owned businesses, and Griffin said that's why the city recently passed the Community Benefits Ordinance.
“Developers and people doing these projects, whether they’re big or small, downtown or anywhere else, need to make sure that the citizens of Cleveland have a return on their investment,” said Griffin. “So they have to put forth a menu of benefits. They have to make sure there’s inclusion in the workforce."
The ordinance aims at development projects where the city offers tax incentives in excess of $250,000 or more. Leaders said the ordinance requires that the project include 30% minority participation, along with 15% for Cleveland small businesses and 7% for women-owned companies, with firms like Next Generation Construction in mind.
“If you look across Northeast Ohio, you don’t see diverse contractors scale, at some point you can’t blame the diverse community, at some point it’s a systematic problem,” said Davis.
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