Elliott faults agency, data on minority-group pacts

LITTLE ROCK — A state senator told the Joint Budget Committee on Wednesday that she’s bothered that the Department of Finance and Administration hasn’t kept tabs on contracts awarded to members of minority groups.

Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, told Jane Benton, director of the Office of State Procurement, that she was disappointed the state didn’t, until Wednesday, follow a law that requires semiannualreporting of such contracts.

Benton said she didn’t know about the law requiring semiannual reports, which is Arkansas Code 25-36-104.

“I am not known as somebody who gets up and bashes staff because I know you have lots to do,” Elliott said. “But I can’t tell you how disappointed I am to hear the answer that ‘we didn’t know the law existed.’”

Benton said her office hasdone “progressive things” to try to achieve a goal of 10 percent minority-group contracting by state agencies.

Her report Wednesday showed 23 state contracts with minority-owned businesses, and that represented 1.69 percent of all contracts during the first two quarters of fiscal 2011.

Benton said she was following another law, Arkansas Code 15-4-301, which requires another type of reporting of minority contracts.

It requires quarterly accounting of agency spending toward contractors owned by members of a minority group, said Patricia Brown, director of the Small and Minority Business Division of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission.

Elliott said the law requiring semiannual reporting was passed in 2003 or 2005. She said she was involved in passing that legislation but didn’t keep up with it previously because she wasn’t on the committees that handle it. She said the lack of reporting came to her attention during Budget Committee meetings last fall.