“There is capacity — great capacity — to create more than 600 new businesses and establish more than 3,500 jobs,” said LaShea Lofton, Dayton’s deputy city manager. “We want to increase the number of firms — Black, brown, women-owned firms — who can employ our community, and that goes to the strategy of building wealth in our community.”
But Dayton City Commissioners Shenise Turner-Sloss and Darryl Fairchild voted against hiring the consultant after saying they are troubled that the city has taken steps to gut the existing Human Relations Council’s funding and staff.
Turner-Sloss said the center will be a poor substitute for the Human Relations Council’s Minority Business Assistance Center, which the city a week ago essentially decided to stop funding after decades in operation.
The Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce now plans to take over the responsibility of establishing and operating the local Minority Business Assistance Center (MBAC), which serves a 12-county region.
“We are the 15th most segregated city in this country,” Turner-Sloss said. “There is a problem — that’s why MBAC exists, that’s why we need to put the money where we need to with HRC.”
New center
On Wednesday night, the Dayton City Commission by a 3 to 2 vote approved a $460,000 contract with Next Street Financial LLC to complete a strategy and business and implementation plan for something the city is calling the Inclusive Business Recovery Opportunity Center.
Next Street, which is based in New York, will collect and analyze data about minority businesses and Dayton’s business ecosystem to come up with a proposal for a new center, said Lofton.
Lofton said the Inclusive Business Recovery Opportunity Center isn’t anything concrete yet, but rather an idea “that we need an intermediary entity to help formalize, frame and advance the ecosystem in our Dayton” community.
Lofton said the city does not want to operate the center — it just plans to support it, and she said the consultant will be expected to identify funding models for making the center self-sustainable.
Dayton’s small business ecosystem is fragmented, Lofton said, and the center hopefully could address gaps and better coordinate resources and services and work with stakeholders.
Lofton said this is the culmination of two years of work by a planning team that included representatives from the University of Dayton, the Miami Valley Urban League, the Human Relations Council, the Entrepreneurs’ Center and other organizations.
Playbook findings
A group called Accelerator for America in spring 2021 released a report called the Inclusive Recovery Playbook that highlighted challenges facing Black-owned businesses in Dayton.
About 40% of Dayton residents are Black, but only about 5% of employer firms are Black-owned, according to the playbook, and nearly half of Black-owned firms in Dayton are concentrated in low-wage industries — far more than their white counterparts.
The report estimates that achieving parity in business creation and ownership would mean Dayton could add more than 600 new Black-owned firms and see more than 3,500 new jobs created.
The report concluded that Dayton needs to think bigger and be more aggressive to develop and grow minority businesses and ensure they have equal opportunities, Lofton said.
3 to 2 vote
But Commissioner Turner-Sloss said it sounds like the proposed center will do the same kind of things as Dayton’s Minority Business Assistance Center (MBAC), which the city has decided to no longer fund and host through the Human Relations Council.
A week ago, Turner-Sloss and Fairchild criticized their three colleagues on the commission for deciding not to apply for state funding for MBAC and allowing the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce to try to take over hosting it.
City officials said the state added new requirements for MBAC grant recipients that would have been burdensome, such as mandating increased staffing levels. Turner-Sloss said the city should be strengthening its Minority Business Assistance Center instead of turning it over to the chamber.
“It is disingenuous to say that we are not reinventing a center when all of the language is clearly there that mimics what was done with the Minority Business Assistance Center,” she said.
Lofton said the center is not going to try to replace or replicate any existing resources and the goal would be to leverage them.
Turner-Sloss said the public and minority businesses should have been given a chance to comment and provide feedback on the proposed center and the city’s decision to stop funding and hosting MBAC.
“The fact that there is clear manipulation on how this was rolled out is my deepest concern,” she said. “Commissioner Shaw has stated vehemently that he is committed to minority businesses ... then why did you not support the (MBAC) application to the state? ... Again, we are not investing in our own organizations.”
Turner-Sloss and Fairchild said the city is starving the Human Relations Council of funding and staff.
“I think we need to do a sober analysis of HRC,” Fairchild said. “Our executive director annually reminds us that it is inadequately funded. If you put up the mission that HRC has and the resources that we’ve allocated to HRC, the gap between those two is enormous.”
Commissioner Shaw said the Human Relations Council from the very beginning was engaged in the planning process that led to a recommendation to create an Inclusive Business Recovery Opportunity Center.
“This has nothing — nothing at all — to do with MBAC,” Shaw said. This “ecosystem includes a variety of services, and MBAC is just one of them.”
Shaw said this planning process began years ago, long before the city learned that the state would decide to impose new rules on its grant funding for MBAC.
He said Turner-Sloss’ narrative about the Inclusive Business Recovery Opportunity Center is perplexing and wrong.
“We are not defunding HRC — never did, we fully funded them in the last budget cycle,” Shaw said. “This is going to strengthen HRC and our work in the minority business space.”
Multiple community members who attended Wednesday’s city commission meeting spoke in opposition to the Next Street contract.
That included Dayton business owner Bethany Ramsey, who told the city commission, “You are willing to pay New Yorkers $460,000 to try to represent our needs, even though there’s a proven track record from MBAC doing the work within our community.”
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