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How contractors meet minority goals in Baltimore: the family plan

The story of Rodney and Pless Jones

September 30, 2011 at 8:17 am 13

RBJ contracting closeup

RBJ Contracting, owned by Rodney Jones, has a lot in common with his father’s company. This closeup of an RBJ excavator was taken in East Baltimore.

Photo by: Mark Reutter

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Sons can come in handy for fathers, especially if the sons are “certified minority contractors” in the city of Baltimore.

Take the case of Rodney B. Jones.

His father, Pless B. Jones, owns P&J Contracting Co. Over the years, the company has gotten big and rich by winning more than $25 million in city contracts. Jones wears other hats, too, such as president of the Maryland Minority Contractors Association, an advocacy group whose marketing director is former mayor Sheila Dixon.

This week Jones was looking to snag yet another city contract, putting in a sealed bid of $343,800 some months ago to stabilize the vacant city-owned property at 103 West Lexington Street.

A previous Brew post described how a competitor – whose $197,800 bid was 74% less for the same job than P&J’s – was disqualified because it only had 27% minority and women participation.

P&J, working as a prime contractor, also needed a boost to reach the city’s 37% goal. That’s where Rodney Jones’ firm came in handy.

RBJ Contracting Co. – the initials of Rodney’s full name – is an MBE or “minority business enterprise.” It was last certified by Baltimore’s Minority and Women’s Business Opportunity Office (MWBOO) on April 15 and can be used to meet city minority goals until April 15, 2013, when its certification comes up for renewal.

By adding RBJ Contracting to his bid, along with another African-American company, American Contractors of Baltimore, Pless Jones boosted the bid’s minority involvement to 29%.

He then crossed the 37% threshold by including Cleo Enterprises Inc., a certified WBE (“women’s business enterprise”) whose incorporation papers list P&J’s street address as its principal office.

Armed with these additions, P&J was certified in compliance with city law, and the company was awarded the contract at the Board of Estimates meeting on Wednesday.

Relationship Not Relevant

The relationship between Pless Jones and the two minority firms were not disclosed in city documents – nor during the discussion of the contract by the Board of Estimates – because the information was not relevant, says Shirley A. Williams, chief of MWBOO.

Pless B. Jones (From P&J Contracting website)

Pless B. Jones (From P&J Contracting website)

Williams said she was aware that the owners of RBJ Contracting and P&J Contracting were related, but her office had determined there was no financial relationship between the two. She said her office looked at the companies’ incorporation documents, bylaws, tax returns and financial statements.

“The law does not prohibit him [Pless Jones] from doing business with his son. His son owns a certified minority business, and we certified the company as independently operated,” Williams said in an interview yesterday.

The same principle holds true with Cleo Enterprises, whose owner, Dierdre M. Ford, runs her asbestos-removal company from Suite 209 of 3010 Ridgewood Ave., the headquarters of P&J Contracting. “Companies can be co-located in the same place, and we can’t assume any relationship between them,” Williams said.

Ordinance Bars Financial or Operational Ties

The city ordinance has a section dealing with financial or operational ties between prime contractors and MBEs and WBEs.

Section 28-41 prohibits a contractor from using MBE/WBE-certified firms to meet the city’s minority goals if the contractor “has a financial interest in, has an interest in the ownership or control of, or is significantly involved in the operation of the certified business enterprise.”

An email and phone messages to Pless and Rodney Jones seeking comment were not answered.

Close-up of a P&J dump truck in East Baltimore, which was working with an RBJ excavator demolishing two rowhouses. (Photo by Mark Reutter)

This P&J dump truck was working with an RBJ excavator demolishing three rowhouses recently. (Photo by Mark Reutter)

There appears to be several financial and operational linkages between the two Jones firms. Rodney Jones, for example, lists his company’s principal office as 2423 Maryland Avenue. The building is owned by Harris Jones Real Estate LLC, whose resident agent is Rodney’s stepmother, Lisa Harris Jones. (The building houses Lisa Jones’ lobbying firm – Harris Jones & Malone LLC – which is also MBE/WBE certified by the city.)

Equipment owned by RBJ has a different address – 3010 Ridgewood Ave in northwest Baltimore. That’s owned by Pless Jones, according to state real estate records.

The father and son companies also share a slogan that’s affixed to the cabs of their respective trucks and excavators. It apparently reflects the success of their businesses – “Minorities on the Move.”

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  • Alev

    This goes on all the time. Several large non-minority contractors have minority subcontractors buy material and sell it back to them to meet the minority requirements. Several contractors have put their business in their wives’ names in order to meet these requirements. Its all another game that costs the taxpayers more money.

  • Anonymous

    Why do race, ethnicity, and sex need to be considered at all in deciding who gets awarded a contract?  It’s good to make sure contracting programs are open to all, that bidding opportunities are widely publicized beforehand, and that no one gets discriminated against because of skin color, national origin, or sex.  But that means no preferences because of skin color, etc. either–whether it’s labeled a “set-aside,” a “quota,” or a “goal,” since they all end up amounting to the same thing.  Such discrimination is unfair and divisive; it breeds corruption (see this article) and otherwise costs the taxpayers and businesses money to award a contract to someone other than the lowest bidder; and it’s almost always illegal—indeed, unconstitutional—to boot (see 42 U.S.C. section 1981 and this model brief: http://www.pacificlegal.org/page.aspx?pid=1342 ).  Those who insist on engaging in such discrimination deserve to be sued, and they will lose (as, indeed, the city has in the past).

    • Devils Advocate

       Yo Bagger, thought I told you to take your tea bags and go jump in the harbor!

  • Derrick Z. Knauts

    This is skewed reporting at its worse. obviously the Baltimore Brew is a pawn media outlet that is being ram-rodded into reporting their news from a puppeted perspective.  The Baltimore Brew’s puppeteers, are part of an organized effort to wrestle away public contracts from the people who occupy this great city, that happens to be predominatley black. Baltimore Brew is trying to lay a foundation for their majority firm backers to obtain waivers and or scrap the minority participation goals program that have been implemented by the city, state and federal governments, for the expressed reasons of keeping majority firms from monoplozing government procuured work, by shady business practices, such as majority firms creating company’s in their wives names and using them as a minority participant.  P&J , as well as RBJ has done more for the folks deemed “unemployable” by the majority’s standard, the any other firm in the city.  What the Baltimore Brew is implying, is what the majority firms have been doing in this city for centuries. The difference is, today, with the advent of the internet, and communication, making the world smaller, folks are able to get the word out about this type of media bias, and I would admonish to the Baltimore Brew, that in this town, the tolerance level for this sort of media spin is at its peak, and the folks of Baltimore will not stand for it, get you shit together, or we will shut that ass down!

    • Devils Advocate

      The Baltimore Brew is anything but a puppet. Sounds like you have some skin in the game.

    • Marc

      What nonsensical ranting. “We will shut that ass down?” I also recall another commenter on another Brew article on MBEs saying something along the lines of “MBEs are not up for debate.” What a very dictatorial and tyrannical viewpoint – “You shall not debate our way of doing business.” Stop languishing in victimology and grow up! But I guess B’more stopped being a democracy a long time ago – where else, for example, would it be permissible for criminals (Welch) to inherit their parent’s council seat?

      I think the things described in this article are a symptom of something larger, and I would compare it to a great article the Brew had a couple months back on the politics of TIF financing. Both issues are symptoms of a larger problem – that of entrepreneurs looking for shortcuts around an oppressive, ridiculous, and unwieldy bureaucracy. No wonder few developers want to engage in urban development, preferring greenfield development instead – urban bureaucracy is far too idiotic and cumbersome to deal with.

      If the rules and regulations for MBEs are impractical and idiotic, then you’ll see firms look for ways around them. If the tax policies in urban areas are punitive, then you’ll see the firms with some resources to rub together try to bend politicians in an effort to get around the punishing tax climate. Thus you see the whole MBE system in B’more abused because it is inherently an impractical and infeasible system, and those with the means to do so will find ways to work around it. The same goes for TIF – it is a way to get around an idiotic taxation system.

      This is exactly the “corruption” present in third world countries. Corruption exists because it is a means for getting around impractical, idiotic rules and regulations. So B’more is like a third world country – individuals look for ways to get things done by moving around the dumb rules and regulations that prevent commerce from being done in a traditional, open, nimble, straightforward manner.

      Past discrimination can only be overcome, it cannot be compensated for. But we decided to compensate for past discrimination by setting up new discriminations, and these new discriminations incite new strategies for working around idiotic laws (just as under the old Jim Crow laws blacks formed their own business districts to get around idiotic discrimination).

      If B’more doesn’t want to see any more of this abuse, it better stop with the half-assed reforms and engage in a complete restructuring and simplification process. Don’t reform MBE/WBEs or TIFs, throw them out altogether and redo the bad regulatory conditions (tax climate, entrepreneurship climate, business climate) that cause these easily-corruptible workarounds to emerge in the first place.

    • Anonymous

      Marion Barryinism is alive and well in Baltimore.

  • Ktrueheart

    Proactive steps to strengthening the oversight and administration of the City’s MWBE Program is apparently needed.   The basic premise of the program can and has been well justified and there is a definite need for it to continue, however dealings as described in this article give the program a bad name.  A public administrator who does not see this type of relationship as a problem, in a world where persception is everything, needs her ethics meter adjusted.  She is definitely not unique in the caverns of Baltimore City Hall.

  • Rick

    As a city resident and taxpayer, I’m appalled that these behind the scenes shenanigans are going on. Furthermore, I see no reason for any minority contractor rule. At what point do we acknowledge a limit to what a local government can do to address discrimination (both perceived and real). The fundamental concern of city government in these situations should be that infrastructure projects are completed safely and as inexpensively as possible. To add the extra layers of bureaucracy that the minority hiring requirements entail only creates costs, wastes tax dollars, and – most importantly – does little to address core discrimination in the city.  If the Mayor and City Council are interested in addressing racial inequality, I suggest they focus on the many thousands of young Black men and women living in poverty in this city and spend less time concerned with the wealthy black and female contractors (most of whom live in the suburbs) who are getting fat off of this foolishness.

  • Curtis

    Derrick Z, make a checklist and count the number of “anti-establishment/business, fight the power, prism of race” articles versus whatever you may view as being the opposite.  You can’t have it your way 100% of the time.

    Frankly, I don’t really see an ethical dilemma here.  A private company selecting a bid wouldn’t care because they’d look at the base price and what they’re getting in return and weigh their decision.  It’s only the public sector’s anti-intuitive benchmarks and rules that would ever make an issue of a father including a son in a business proposal wrong.  

    I could play devil’s advocate and say the son could have jacked-up the price because this essentially became a non-competitive bid situation, but who cares if the first bid for 74% less (before change orders) was turned down???  The non-related contractors can do the same.  As for performance, the job will either get done or it won’t.  

  • Gerald Neily

    Brew readers and commenters are THE BEST. These often brilliant and from-the-heart words surely show it. While Sun columnists often trash their own readers to create a “story”, the Brew’s earn plenty of love. My personal favorite here is Marc’s, which I’d call downright eloquent, but even the object of his words, Derrick Z. Knauts, deserves plenty of credit for putting his actual name behind his passion (provided it is his real name). I only wish Devil’s Advocate would do the same when he threatens Roger Clegg, even as he or she praises the Brew’s rights in his/her next comment. But it all shows that while our sacred freedom of speech might be struggling in some quarters of Baltimore, it is at least alive and well at the Baltimore Brew !!!!!

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_CXOITMLTMCOTTFR377LMT4X4EU cleancut77

    As a black person I find these shenanigans appalling and in affront to the capitalist system not to mention a gross mismanagement of city funds in a city that is perpetually crying poverty.

  • Potts and Pans

    I long for the good ol’ days when it only took a big fat campaign contribution to land a big fat “no bid” contract. 

    http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2000-02-03/news/0002030328_1_loizeaux-demolition-contributions

    Things were so much simpler then.

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