by Steve Metalitz and Ken Jaffe
Temple Sinai’s commitment to becoming an anti-racist synagogue extends to all aspects of Temple activity. Over the past few years, the Racial Equity Project of the Temple’s Multiracial Sinai (MRS) Committee has worked with a wide range of Temple committees and projects to advance this goal. In this posting, we provide a progress report regarding one of our congregation’s most financially and institutionally significant projects: the renovation and expansion of our Temple building.
Viewed through an anti-racist lens, a key goal is for the renovation and expansion project to employ, to the greatest extent feasible, Minority-Owned Businesses as contractors and subcontractors. It is critical to take concrete steps to ensure that Black-Owned and Minority-Owned Businesses, which historically have been largely excluded from lucrative building projects, are well represented among the firms that we engage to renovate and expand our Temple. The MRS Racial Equity Project has engaged continuously with the Renovation and Expansion (R&E) Committee to encourage this approach, and urged it to prioritize the awarding of subcontracts to Minority-Owned Businesses.
The R&E Committee made the inclusion of Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses in the renovation project a core objective. As it sought to select a general contractor for the second phase of the project – the construction of an addition to the building—the Committee evaluated each applicant’s demonstrated ability to include Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses in its projects, its processes for identifying qualified subcontractors with diverse ownership, and its management team. Based on these considerations, as well as the other strengths reflected in its bid, Scott-Long Construction, Inc., was selected by the R&E Committee as the general contractor for the project. Among other factors, the Committee noted that Scott-Long’s management team reflected racial diversity in leadership roles, including representation in the roles of Project Manager and Project Superintendent.
Both in the first phase of the project (the completed Sanctuary and Social Hall renovation) and the current second phase, the R&E Committee ensured that the Temple’s general contractor made targeted efforts to recruit Minority-Owned and Women-Owned Businesses to bid on subcontracts. In both phases, the R&E Committee employed contract structures that enabled the Temple to work with the contractor to promote the selection of those businesses, where feasible, even in cases where they might not be the lowest bidder. This approach enabled the Temple to ensure that the contracting process advanced our diversity and equity goals.
In spite of challenges that the pandemic presented for the construction industry, the R&E Committee’s efforts bore fruit. The make-up of firms working on the project reflects substantial participation by Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses. Overall, about 15% of the total value of subcontracts in the project went to those firms, including eight subcontractor firms which are Minority-Owned Businesses and five which are Women-Owned Businesses. The proportion was higher in the first phase than in the second phase, which may be partly attributable to the specific features of our project and the challenges of attracting bidders for the second phase. While these challenges affected both Minority-Owned Businesses and other firms, Scott-Long’s proactive solicitation of bids from some 191 Minority-Owned and Women-Owned Businesses actually produced a slightly higher rate of responsive bids than from the firms solicited overall. In fact, two of the largest second phase subcontracts were awarded to Minority-Owned Businesses.
The Racial Equity Project would have preferred that a higher proportion of the subcontract value had gone to Minority-Owned Businesses; so the results achieved were not a complete success. However, we commend the R&E Committee for both taking seriously the value of maximizing the participation of Minority-Owned Businesses in our project, and for the concrete steps they took, both directly and through our general contractors, to advance this goal. We also recognize that the difficulty in giving even more work on this project to Minority-Owned Businesses was due in part to the ongoing legacy of systemic racism in the construction industry that will take years of dedicated effort to undo.
The process of the Racial Equity Project’s engagement with the R&E Committee on this issue over the past two years illustrates the wide scope of Temple activities where we can apply an anti-racist lens, and where we as a congregation can seize opportunities to contribute to the dismantling of racist patterns and structures in our society. This work is part of the broader collaborative effort to make Temple Sinai an affirmatively anti-racist congregation.