Q House Lags On Black Construction Work

A third of the way through the construction of the new Q House, only 9 percent of subcontractors working on the project have been African American-owned companies, and less than 8 percent of the total construction workforce for the project has been Black.

A dozen local, Black small business contractors rallied outside of the future community center site to protest that lack of work, and to lambast a city-funded hiring initiative they argued benefits the county more than it does New Haven proper.

That protest took place Thursday afternoon outside of the Q House construction site at 197 Dixwell Ave.

It came one day after local small business contractors, Q House board members, and even the former president of the Board of Alders laid into city staff and the project’s Branford-based general contractor for those dismal numbers for a project being built at the heart of New Haven’s historically African American community.

Those criticisms were leveled Wednesday night during a two-hour emergency virtual meeting of the Q House Advisory Board.

“This building is the culmination of a failed system,” New Haven Firestop Systems owner Robert Walker said about the Q House construction project during Thursday’s protest. ​“This building just happened to be the George Floyd, this building just happened to be the one that everyone talks about. There’s many of us who have talked for years about a failed program. (See below for more on the protest.)

Wednesday night’s meeting took place online via the Zoom videoconferencing platform, as City Hall remains closed indefinitely to the public because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The focus of the meeting was how few African American subcontractors and construction workers have been hired so far to build out the new Q House, a planned 54,000 square-foot, two-story building that will house the Stetson Library, the Cornell Scott Hill Health Center, the Dixwell Senior Center, and a new basketball court and recording studio, among other amenities.

Construction on that new community center has been underway since Sept. 2019. The Branford-based firm A. Secondino and Son has served as the city-owned project’s general contractor.

City Engineer Giovanni Zinn (pictured) said Wednesday night that roughly 32 percent of the roughly $16.7 million project is complete.

And so far, only 9 percent of subcontracts have been awarded to African American-owned small businesses, and only 7.92 percent of the total workforce (that is, the actual individual construction workers employed on the project) have been African American.

“Certainly we have a lot of space here to improve,” Zinn said.

Click here to download a detailed, 503-page document submitted by Zinn to the Q House Advisory Board that describes the outreach efforts by the city and the general contractor so far, as well as which companies have worked on the Q House to date. And click here to watch the full hearing. (The access password for the video is 6h=EG8O.)

According to Zinn’s presentation, 13 percent of subcontracts have gone to Hispanic-owned small business and 17 percent have gone to women-owned small business, while 38.92 percent of the workforce has been Hispanic and 53.16 percent has been white or other.

Zinn and A Secondino & Son Project Manager Gary Broderick said that only 21 African American-owned small business contractors and only 13 Hispanic-owned small business contractors based out of New Haven are registered with the state Department of Administrative Services (DAS) as well as with the city’s Small Contractor Development program.

Zinn said that the city sent letters about the project to 356 New Haven-based home improvement, plumbing, mechanical, electrical, heating/piping/cooling, and other contractors back in March 2019. That month, the city also hosted two events at Dixwell’s Stetson Library in which they encouraged attendees to apply for subcontracting gigs. Roughly a year later, on Feb. 13, 2020, the city and Secondino hosted a subcontracting fair at the city’s opportunity center at 316 Dixwell Ave. to promote the job again.

“I still do want to get as many people from New Haven and from the neighborhood involved in this project,” Broderick said. ​“It’s better for us. It’s better for everybody.”

Both Zinn and Broderick said that the remediation, foundation, and steel frame work that has taken place so far has been relatively time-sensitive and specialized. The rest of the work yet to be done, including interior framing, gypsum, acoustic panel ceiling, ​“that’s all up for grabs,” Broderick said. ​“I’d love to give it out to those contractors from the local community.”

Zinn and Broderick also said that one of that the project’s $1.2 million general trade package had been awarded to a local Hispanic-owned subcontractor called Cantos Carpentry. They said that company did a poor job communicating with subcontractors that were supposed to hire, and that that company ultimately ​“abandoned their contract in the 11th hour,” according to Broderick.

The many people listening in on the call were none too impressed with the allocation of work for the project so far.

One of the sharpest criticisms of the night came from Jorge Perez (pictured), the former president of the Board of Alders who is currently the state’s banking commissioner.

He said the city and the alders knew several years ago in the early stages of planning for the construction of a new Q House that finding local African American subcontractors would be a challenge, in large part because there are not many officially registered with the state and the city.

“Is this news to you?” he asked. ​“We haven’t done anything about it. This is so frustrating to me.”

He said the city should have all along helped local subcontractors register where necessary if they were having trouble accessing the project through official channels.

“Two years ago we know what the problem was. A year ago we knew what the problem was. We thought we found a solution to the problem. And here we are, with the same problem.”

Q House Building Committee Member Dottie Green (pictured) was similarly frustrated and flummoxed by the low African American workforce numbers.

“There needs to be more all around done to push” for African American hiring, she said, ​“because there’s extra effort that needs to go into this one.”

“At the rate we’re going right now, I’m very concerned that this is going to be another place where we said, ​‘We tried but it just didn’t happen,’” she continued. ​“I don’t feel we can have this project go like this.”

Local small business contractor Rodney Williams (pictured) agreed. He argued that both Secondino and Cantos, when the latter was still working on the project, have done a poor job of communicating with local construction contractors interested in working on this project. And because Cantos dropped out, he said, Secondino has taken over doing some of the exterior framing work that is supposed to be open to subcontractors. ​“That’s not right,” he said.

Broderick said some of that work around exterior framing for the skylights and parapets have been done by Secondino, albeit reluctantly, because of a time crunch exacerbated by Cantos dropping out.

Fred McKinney (pictured), the Carlton Highsmith Chair of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Quinnipiac University, also expressed his frustration at the dearth of African American participation in the construction project so far.

“If the city wants to accommodate the goals of minority participation in this project, a specific goal has to be set on the two-thirds of the project that remains.”

And he said that the hiring goals laid out in the city’s 12 ½ and 12 ¼ guidelines—such as African American-owned small businesses making up 10 percent of the subcontractors on a given project — should be viewed as a floor, not as a ceiling.

“It’s too important and it’s going to be too costly politically if the general contractors and the city do not make a concerted effort that on this project we’re gonna have X percent” African American workers and subcontractors, he said, while declining to recommend what exactly that X percentage should be at this time.

He also called on local Black and Hispanic-owned small business contractors to join forces in the future to make sure that there are minority-owned constructor contractors in New Haven who are capable of serving as the general contractor, and not just as the subcontractor, on projects of this scale.

“This is a project that should have been won and managed by a Black general contractor,” he said. ​“This thing is upside down.”

Zinn and Broderick vowed to work more closely with New Haven Works going forward, and to step up their local outreach for the remaining construction work for the project.

Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison thanked Zinn and Broderick for their work — and stressed the importance of hiring local minority-owned businesses, especially for a project that means so much to New Haven’s African American community.

“We’re not playing around,” she said. ​“This has to be for us, by us.”

“Symptom Of A Bigger Problem”

Many of the local contractors who turned out for Thursday’s protest — some of whom had also called in Wednesday night — echoed a similar line of criticism as they stood in front of the steel framing of the Q House to come.

“We deserve an opportunity to work on these projects in the city, in the state, and now’s a time for us to do that,” Williams said.

He said that the city’s Small Contractor Development (SCD) program, which seeks to implement the city ordinance-stated guidelines around minority contractor and workforce representation, is inclusive of the entire county — and all too often results in work going to people who live in surrounding towns.

“You talk about a bag of money, and we’ve got a sandwich bag,” he said about what’s left over for New Haveners who want to work on local construction projects.

Local carpenters union representative and City Plan Commission member Ernest Pagan agreed.

“We’ve got to keep tearing down these walls,” he said. ​“There’s tons of opportunity here. Every corner of this city, there’s construction. There’s literally enough for everybody. Why guys are not getting their fair share, that’s a problem.”

He pointed out that the Q House job is not governed by a union contract. Nevertheless, he and fellow union carpenter Kenyatta Woods turned out Thursday to support his non-unionized local construction colleagues because of a shared understanding that everyone in New Haven deserves to work.

“No longer can we contribute without getting our fair share,” said local landscape business owner Jayuan Carter (pictured).

Williams lamented that much of the two-thirds of the Q House construction work left to do is mechanical and electrical, and will likely be awarded to workers outside New Haven.

“If two-thirds is left, identify the scopes of work that we can do, and give us as much as we can eat,” he said about what he would like the city to do to make sure that local Black-owned businesses win subcontracts for the work left to be done.

“Find out what we can do, and give us all we can get.”

“We tired of having to crawl into a job that has already been awarded to someone else,” said Robert Carter (pictured at center). ​“This is a symptom of a bigger problem.”