Rahm's Promise

Decrease the burden on the minority-owned business enterprises (MBE) and women-owned business enterprises (WBE) in the WBE / MBE program and implement universal certification.

Rhetorical Nonsense

All of it. We found the promises to punish offenders especially galling since we do not know what zero tolerance and a ten year ban really mean in this regard. It just sounds like pure pandering.

Possible Problems

Our reviewers thought we should bring everyone up to date on the state of the law all programs had better NOT be in violation of before we could evaluate Rahm’s proposal. This led to use being able to say that based on the information in front of us we can’t know if Rahm’s plan as devised will help anyone. The details are crucial and there aren’t any…

Notes

Strangely when we scoured the 21st Century Commission here in Chicago we could not find the guiding principles his policy people claim will be guiding their work on MBE and WBE programs. Aside from that little detail, which is large we weren’t sure what to make of Mr. Emanuel’s plans in this area. Also, simply changing how the program works in such a vague way does not one thing to address the issue of front companies, which is what the present system is supposed to address.