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The citizen committee charged with increasing participation by women and minorities in city projects painted a dire picture of progress – or the lack of it – in a presentation Wednesday to city council, and divisions over the proper course-correcting approach rose to the fore.

First, the city’s elected leaders viewed data presented by members of the Equitable Contracting and Purchasing Commission, and agreed it looked bleak.

Commissioner Amanda Fritz called the situation “horrifying.”

“We have to have fairness in jobs, contracts and services. We’re not there on other equity issues and we’re not there on this,” she said.

Among the data:

• For 2014-15, Caucasian men worked 6,020 hours, while African-American men worked 286 and African-American women worked 61.

• African-American women have worked a smaller share each year from 2011 to 2015. And most other minority categories have declined since 2011.

• Though Caucasian men dwarf all other categories of workers in bar graphs, with that group removed from the picture, it’s Latino men who tower over all other categories. For 2014-15, Latino men worked 1,398 hours, compared with 110 hours for Asian men and 34 for Latinas.

“Clearly the system is broken,” said ECPC member Michael Burch. “Mayor Hales, city council, these are not distant memories of the ’50s and ’60s. These are realities from the last five years.”

ECPC members made several recommendations to council, including setting a hard goal of 15 percent MWESB participation for all city projects, providing the ECPC with a list of upcoming city projects and developing a tracking system for small business participation.

But not everyone in Portland’s minority contracting community agrees with all of the ECPC’s recommendations – specifically its support of a procurement method known as Community Benefit Agreements. Two of those voices – James Posey and Nate McCoy spoke at Wednesday’s hearing at City Hall.

McCoy is the executive director of the Oregon chapter of the National Association of Minority Contractors and a former project manager for the Portland Housing Bureau. He said there was much common ground for those pushing for equity in contracting, but added that CBAs are too union friendly, which can inhibit minority business owners who try to hire from their own communities.

He suggested an effective approach could involve going after state law mandating the low-bid procurement method over alternatives, such as construction manager-general contractor, in order to make hitting equity goals easier.

The ECPC was established by the council last year to increase inclusion of women and minorities in city projects. The group was originally housed under a division of the Office of Management and Finance, but Portland Mayor Charlie Hales relocated it to the Office of Equity and Human Rights, which was seen as a better fit with the ECPC group’s mission.

There are currently six members of the ECPC commission, and three open seats. ECPC chair Dante James said he would return to council in the next 60 days with the names of replacements.

James Posey, a longstanding voice in Portland’s African-American contracting community, asked council members to look into why three members of the ECPC suddenly quit this summer and said they objected to the ECPC pushing CBAs.

“I predicted this CBA catastrophe,” he said, referring to an that heavily criticized the use of CBAs in two Water Bureau projects. “The consultants got more work than the contractors did – that’s embarrassing.”

Said Commissioner Nick Fish: “How do we reconcile these interests – CBAs, no CBAs? Let’s say we start with the premise that if you don’t care what the machinery was, but you do care about the outcome … well then we’re all in accord.”

With just three months remaining in office, Hales acknowledged his time to impact the issue is short. The question remaining is what mayor-elect Ted Wheeler will do.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Hales said. “We have an unacceptable picture that’s just been clearly revealed to us by the report we heard today. But I think it might have less to do with who’s in this office than how we’ve set this up to succeed. Maybe if we’re dealing with institutionalized racism, we need institutionalized authority to act on the problem.”

The council will hold a hearing on community benefit agreements at 2 p.m. on Sept. 21.