WCP | A 'Preference Points' System Was Supposed to Help a Ward 8 Business Owner. It Didn't.

February 1, 2019 The Advoc8te

Morgan Baskin of the Washington City Paper just posted a follow-up to last week’s WCP cover story. Just when I didn’t think it could have gotten any worse, it did. Please take a moment and read this article and then contact your Councilmember. This shouldn’t be okay.

My heart just breaks for Mr. Reid, the DC small business owner who after 20 years found himself out of business because he couldn’t compete in what was supposed to be a fairer fight.

I’m out of the country right now and I had to just take a minute and collect myself emotionally. I have never met Calvin Reid but I could feel his pain. Mr. Reid did all the “right” things: he invested in the community, hired Ward 7 and Ward 8 residents and was registered as a CBE. Yet after two decades of hard work and sacrifice, in the end his good works wasn’t enough to get him the work on the Entertainment and Sports Arena project — a North Carolina based company was selected instead.

The Advoc8te is getting really tired of hearing stories like Mr. Reid’s, east of the river small business owners who stick it out hoping for a better day, and when that day comes they get overlooked for companies have very little skin in this game and who may not even based in DC, let alone east of the river. I’ve seen this more times than I can count in the 10 years I’ve been a small business owner and consultant. It got to the point that I had to create a policy on this site to address it. After my own ESA fiasco I saw the writing on the wall, if I was not prepared to diversify my own client base (when in reality my passion is working on EotR projects) I may find myself the way of several other EotR small businesses — out of business.

That was a really sobering reality.

The Advoc8te may be letting her bias/frustration show today but somebody had to say it - and publicly. For the life of me I can’t understand why Ward 8’s “leaders” are being so quiet about this. Of all the things to coordinate a march and protest against, you would think this would be it.

Oh well, maybe that work is being outsourced to an outside company too.

Atlas was CBE certified for over 20 years. But after years of working on high-visibility, high-value District projects, like St. Elizabeths Hospital, the Cardozo Education Campus, and the Petworth Neighborhood Library, Reid says he can’t afford to stay in business anymore. Merely “participating” became too financially draining. And the deciding blow against Atlas, as Reid tells it, was the Entertainment and Sports Arena. As early as October of 2016, Reid expressed concerns about the management of the project in an email to architect Michael Marshall. Two development companies, Smoot Construction and and Gilbane Building Company, were to jointly serve as ESA’s general contractor. That strategy “always seems to manifest a few jobs for some, but rarely provides an economic boost to other existing businesses in this city,” Reid wrote, according to a copy of the email he provided to City Paper. Despite those reservations, he submitted a bid for structural steel work on the arena. He lost, and is still smarting from it. The winning bid went to SteelFab, a structural steel fabricator with headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, and 14 other locations across the American Southeast. (City Paper asked the offices of Brian Kenner, the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, and the Department of Small and Local Business Development, the agency that runs D.C.’s CBE certification program, for a comment on why SteelFab received the contract over Atlas. They declined to submit one.) Coupled with other financial losses over the year—Reid estimates that he’s owed about $2 million in back pay since 2007 from working overtime on District projects that his company wasn’t reimbursed for––missing out on the ESA contract made it nearly impossible to keep his company financially solvent. Reid compares owning a small construction business in D.C. to being “the hamster on the wheel,” constantly scrambling for new contracts just to compensate for losses on old ones. Now, he says, “I’m not doing that anymore.” He has laid off dozens of employees, many of whom were Ward 8 residents making between $40,000 and $60,000 annually, and had worked with Atlas for over a decade.

MORGAN BASKIN, WASHINGTON CITY PAPER