Jackson Free Press

The city of Jackson is returning its Equal Business Opportunity Office to its former glory. On Dec. 1, the city hired professional speaker and public relations consultant Pamela Confer as head of the office, which serves to increase minority business participation in city contracts.

Confer will work with planner Jeremiah Liddell to train minority-owned businesses (including those owned by blacks, Latinos and women) on how to compete in the city's bidding process for city contracts. Contractors must be certified with the city to be eligible for city contracts, but the EBO helps minority-owned businesses weave their way through that application process. The office goes a little further by also offering step-by-step counseling on how to start a business, and it can steer prospective business owners toward sources of grant money to help get or keep their doors open.

The office, created by Johnson in 2000, exists to help the city reach a goal of at least 6 percent minority participation on applicable contracts worth more than $50,000—a goal in which Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. excelled until Mayor Frank Melton unseated Johnson in the 2004 elections and fired the office's director. Minority participation is one of the defining attributes that can make or break a contract proposal with the city, so much so that many white-owned contractors hire minority sub-contractors to sweeten their deal.

A city equal-opportunity ordinance presses the mayor's office to encourage minority participation in city business, but Confer said Melton did not see the value of the office, based upon the state of the agency at the time of her arrival.

"I would say the previous mayor's emphasis was not necessarily on this office and what the city ordinance called for. The office was basically inert for years," Confer said.

The office languished under Melton, who fired Former Equal Business Opportunity Director Tanya Ross in 2006. Ross claimed Melton's Personnel Director Marcus Ward escorted her from her building, accompanied by an armed guard.

Confer said putting the office back together involves painstakingly going from department to department and gathering four year's worth of long dormant information.

"We're trying to recapture data and get an overview of what the past participation has been and re-centralize the process, so we can get minority business owners back into the fold. They need to know when the bid openings are, so they can attend them and have an equal opportunity to bid on them," she said.

Web developer James Covington, who owns iVision, said the newly invigorated office will prove a benefit to local minority business owners.

"You could not pick a better time for something like this," said Covington, who once held a maintenance contract for the city's cell-phone towers until Melton refused to renew the contract two years ago. "The country has a severe need to create more African American businesses. Other than government, African Americans employ the most African Americans, and the nation's rate for minority unemployment is much higher than the unemployment rate for everybody else."