Bert Caldwell: State can do more for minority businesses

This may be the busiest year for Womer & Associates since William “Willie” Womer founded the engineering and architectural firm 14 years ago. No thanks to the State of Washington and its alleged commitment to hiring qualified minority- and women-owned businesses.

Womer is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribe. The firm’s staff of 30 is almost one-half Native Americans, members of other minorities, or immigrants. Two recent hires come from Sudan and Portugal.Womer is proud of its diversity. Not only for the variety of viewpoints the staff can bring to each project, but also for the family atmosphere the firm tries to maintain.

Although manpower levels fluctuate with the flow of projects, few people have ever been laid off. Womer, which occupies a handsome building on East Springfield, will do about $3 million in business this year from a mix of tribal, public and private contracts.

Public clients include Spokane International Airport, with which Womer has a longstanding relationship, and Vera Water & Power. But in its search for more such contracts, Womer has found itself in Kansas, Arizona and New Mexico, where its identity as a Native American-owned firm from Eastern Washington does not seem to carry a stigma, says Marketing Director Nima Motahari.

In Olympia, he says, expectations regarding professional competence seem to diminish the farther east a firm is headquartered. They are even lower if the firm is minority-owned.

Although tribes in the region have been stalwart clients, Motahari says even some of them had to be convinced Indians could do top-notch work.

An annual report of the Office of Minority and Women’s Business Enterprises showed how poor a job the State of Washington does getting contract dollars to those businesses. Together, they get less than 2 percent of the work awarded by state agencies.

Gov. Chris Gregoire has called on her agency heads to do better, and Motahari and Ben Cabildo, director of AHANA, have been talking with the Washington state Department of General Administration about how those numbers can be improved.

Womer has been successful — it is one of the largest architectural and engineering firms in Spokane — but quiet. Motahari says Womer decided to raise its voice because other minority firms need a champion who can speak to the challenges they face.

Vice President Bob Smith says he is concerned by the vanishing state commitment to working with minority companies.

“We’re not whining,” he says. “We’re successful because we’re good.”

Smith says the problem getting public contracts is not so much in the competitive bidding that awards business on the basis of price.

The missed opportunities, he says, are in the selection of engineering and design services that occurs prior to bidding. That part of the process is less formal, with potential service providers submitting proposals, and explaining their approach during interviews.

Relationships are critical. “They pick someone they are comfortable with,” Smith says.

The irony, he adds, is that many in the community assume minority-owned firms have an inside track on government contracts. They do not.

Motahari says Womer can design a state-of-the-art education center for the Nisqually Tribe, but not even get a call from Community Colleges of Spokane. Many agencies have nearly exclusive relationships with just a few contractors, he says.

When the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture was expanded in the late 1990s, the design work went to a Portland firm. Womer, the only full-service, Native American-owned architectural and engineering firm in the area, if not the state, was not consulted, even as a subcontractor.

Motahari says inclusion in the Minority and Women’s Business catalog has no value. Filling out the paperwork to become a certified minority business takes almost a week, he says, yet Womer has never scored work through that office.

The difficulty landing public work has been particularly galling because some of its professionals worked on major public projects while with other firms. Smith, for example, held a comparable position with Bovay Northwest before that firm was acquired by Dames & Moore in the mid-1990s. While there, he helped design Spokane’s wastewater treatment plant, and numerous expansions.

Bovay had more or less incubated Womer, which had specialized in business planning. As Bovay’s corps of designers and engineers moved on following the Dames & Moore acquisition, some gravitated to Womer, which was expanding its business.

But perceptions change when you are a minority-owned company, even if you are white.

“Things that I didn’t think happened, happen,” Smith says.