AUSTIN – Representative Eric Johnson recently filed House Bill 1489 to freeze the pay of any state agency heads who miss their Historically Underutilized Business (HUB) contracting goals. By law, a certain percentage of all state agency contracts are required to be awarded to women and minority-owned businesses, and this bill serves as a necessary accountability measure.Representative Eric Johnson (D-Dallas) also filed House Bill 671, a bill that would direct ten percent of the funds from the Texas Enterprise Fund to the Capital Access Fund, which was founded to help banks provide much-needed financial assistance to women and minority-owned businesses.
“The State of Texas fails to support HUBs year after year. While I applaud the Governor’s efforts to highlight Texas’ successful women entrepreneurs in his State of the State address, there is significant room for improvement with respect to the state’s support for minority-owned businesses. These pieces of legislation will provide crucial mechanisms to incentivize the government to invest in these valuable pillars of our communities,” said Representative Johnson.
Enforcing racial and gender quotas is unconstitutional AND bad policy.
It’s good to make sure contracting programs are open to all, that bidding opportunities are widely publicized beforehand, and that no one gets discriminated against because of skin color, national origin, or sex. But that means no preferences because of skin color, etc. either–whether it’s labeled a “set-aside,” a “quota,” or a “goal,” since they all end up amounting to the same thing.
Such discrimination is unfair and divisive; it breeds corruption and otherwise costs the taxpayers and businesses money to award a contract to someone other than the lowest bidder; and it’s almost always illegal—indeed, unconstitutional—to boot (see 42 U.S.C. section 1981 and this model brief: http://www.pacificlegal.org/document.doc?id=454 ).
Those who insist on engaging in such discrimination deserve to be sued, and they will lose. How would you like it if you owned a company and lost out on a bid because you were the wrong color or the wrong sex? Why do race, ethnicity, and sex need to be considered at all in deciding who gets awarded a contract?