Rebuilding beyond the fire: CA Black contractors demand fair share of recovery work
The well-organized Black contractors of California report that they will accept nothing less than a fair share of the contracts being placed on the table for the current post-disaster rebuilding effort following California’s most destructive firestorm.
A clarion call to action has come from Drexell Johnson, founder-president of the Young Black Contractors Association (YBCA) of Los Angeles, a core affiliate of the National Black Contractors Association (NBCA) based in San Diego. Johnson, a native of Bolton, Mississippi, has requested that Black Mississippians join hands with their California brothers and sisters to motivate Congressional support in awarding a fair amount of cleanup contracts to Black entrepreneurs.
The ironic aspect of the California situation – called “Karma” by some believers in a primal kind of justice – is that Johnson and his fellow Black contractors were already preparing for a showdown with the people in control of awarding major contracts before the devastating fires began.
In a protest rally set for January 21, Johnson and YBCA members planned to call for the shutdown of the $1.3 billion Hollywood Burbank Airport Project. Holder Construction Company and other general contractors in control of the project “have a recent and negative history of excluding local Black contractors,” Johnson said in a telephone interview Monday.
The rally is still scheduled for 9 a.m. January 21 at the Hollywood Burbank Airport.
Johnson explains: “Our survey shows that Black contractors are awarded less than one-seventeenth of 1 percent of public works projects on highways, bridges, airports, underground, and railways, although African Americans are 23 percent of taxpayers. Hollywood Burbank Airport must be shut down.”
BUSINESS BOOM
The Hollywood Burbank Airport Project is worth $1.3 billion and broke ground in early 2024. It is set for completion in 2026.
Another major project already begun in the same area was the $500 million redevelopment of the Warner Bros Ranch in Burbank that began in November 2023. The development is part of a larger expansion for Warner Bros as it plans to invest at least another $1 billion to grow its presence in the Los Angeles area, the new owners of the company announced last year.
At Hollywood Burbank Airport, a young Black woman is doing the outreach, Johnson said in referring to her as a “gatekeeper.” He also pointed out that the major contractors have assigned the young Black male owner of TEC Management – “who’s supposed to be on the team of general contractors,” says Johnson. This young Black man had gotten several contracts for the YBCA leader and his group members to do a lot of work at LAX that they were never paid for, Johnson alleges. “His involvement there is so small that he shouldn’t even be there. He’s another gatekeeper,” Johnson said.
“These general contractors are fraudulent, in violation of, and non-compliant with federal guidelines, mandates, and provisions governing the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the HUD Program, DOT, and the Federal Highway Administration,” Johnson claims.
“Hollywood-Burbank Airport engages in bait-and-switch tactics against Black contractors, which is a modern-day form of Jim Crow and sharecropping,” Johnson alleges.
“Despite President Biden’s signing of the $1 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Investment Act into law in 2021,” he pointed out, “Black contractors are still being excluded from this project.”
REACHING OUT
“We want to reach out to Congressman Bennie Thompson in Mississippi, Danny Davis in Illinois, and Representatives Troy Carter and Cleo Fields from Louisiana and other strong Democrats to advance our cause in the Congress,” Johnson said.
CalTrans (California Transportation System) is required under 49-CFR to administer a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) Program, he says. “The DBE Program is intended to ensure a level playing field and foster equal opportunity in federal-aid contracts.”
“All we want to do is show Black people that you shouldn’t beg for an opportunity when you’re in a position to demand your rightful share,” he said.
READY TO GO
“The NBCA stands at the ready,” says National Black Contractors Association President Abdur Rahim-Hameed from his office in San Diego. “We were there with Katrina. We were there with the Northridge earthquake in 1994. And we were there for the storms of 2021 through last year. And we’re here today to build beyond the firestorms.
“What we’re looking at is to use our organization to bring back better. But Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to keep these illegals here who were about to be deported, saying we can’t get rid of them now, because we’ve got to rebuild all these homes.
“But we’re going to train and skill up the African Americans, and we’ve already organized the first Black carpenters’ union in the United States since the 20th century,” Hameed said. “Our Black carpenters’ union, along with other brothers and sisters, are going to rebuild California. Californians need to rebuild California. There’s enough unemployment, and enough homelessness, with people in need of jobs, and people coming out of high school by the hundreds, if not thousands, who are going to need a career in construction.
“So, we’re going to train and build. And this is all for individual owners who are making decisions about their own property, and it’s not a city or county final decision. The county is going to rebuild infrastructure with FEMA money, but they’ve got big lawsuits coming because they had fire hydrants with no water. There’s going to be hell to pay with these politicians,” Hameed predicted.
The fire has consumed unprecedented thousands of square acres of land and nearly 20,000 homes and other structures in and around the ritzy Pacific Palisades. And it has had a similar, though noticeably smaller, impact on the middle-class Eaton section of Los Angeles County. The LA suburbs of Altadena and Pasadena have the highest concentration of middle-class Black homes of the area and suffered devastation early.
“We’ve got to get on the ball and get our Black contractors on the front line. We’re boots on the ground,” Hameed said.
POLITICAL HARDBALL
While Johnson says he would never jump over to the Republican Party, he is never hesitant to criticize what he sees as betrayal and ineptitude on the part of Democratic leaders, Black and white.
“When the Democratic National Committee was here in 2000, only two Black contractors were brought on board,” said Johnson. “I had the contract to bring in the toilets, and Frank Holderman’s Boulevard Café was contracted for some of the food. Everything else was done by 90 percent Hispanics and 10 percent whites.
“And that was just wrong. When I went to (Congresswoman) Maxine Waters to complain about it, she made something happen. But the political leaders don’t know anything about the contracts here. They don’t even care.
“The Democratic Party has got to step up to the plate and show us some real support in obtaining these large contracts that somehow always seem to pass right by us – the Black contractors – in all situations. We’ve been there for them as Black folk, and they need to make sure we get a representative number of these contracts.”
Johnson says that he has a strong feeling that California’s newest senator, former Representative Adam Schiff, will follow through on the promises he made to the YBCA leader and the group membership. Johnson said he met with Schiff on several occasions before, during, and after his campaign for the senate seat once held by the late Dianne Feinstein.
“I don’t believe that any man could speak as frankly and sincerely as Adam Schiff spoke to me on these matters and then not make his greatest effort to follow up on those promises,” Johnson said.
NEW FRONTIERS
Hameed said the NBCA will organize itself into one of the most effective organizations ever in preparation for the next phase of American history.
Looking at past disasters, Hameed said Black contractors never got fair consideration in the rebuilding effort at that time.
“What they did during Katrina was to bring 100,000 illegal Mexicans down to New Orleans and took the jobs away from the Black labor pool there that was already devastated,” he said. “When I went down to the 9th Ward, people there said to me, ‘We were here before they came (the illegals). And we’ll be here when they leave. They’ve always created internal borders for the Spanish-speaking work forces which denies a Black worker from learning the jobs from a Spanish-speaking labor group because they say, ‘Our crew is all Spanish speaking and so we can’t use you,’” he said.
“We’re going to have a Zoom conference to strategize on how we’re going to work this, because everybody is in a reactive mode. We’re going to be proactive. We know that when the smoke settles, there’s going to be a massive clean up to be done. There’s going to be foundations that are going to have to be ripped out and consigned to demolition,” Hameed explained.
“We’ve done this before,” Hameed said. “We’ve been here before. And we’re here today as Californians, and our policy is that Californians are supposed to help Californians.”
“We want to be on the developing side of things,” he said. “And we’re going to build back better. In November 2024, we started developing the first Black carpenters’ union since the 20th Century. We’ve started it and we have a number of states involved – Alabama, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania. We also have a representative there in Mississippi. You see if you go after the low-hanging fruit, and organize the contract worker, then you’ll be able to develop contractors for the future.”
