Members of an Oregon Department of Transportation advisory committee are calling out the agency’s leadership for its response after a committee member made racist and sexist comments.
The comments came in a survey circulated internally to members of the agency’s community workforce agreement advisory committee. The group helps guide ODOT equity policy on how the state contracts with construction firms owned by women and people of color.
Committee members say ODOT isn’t doing enough to protect BIPOC- and women-owned firms — and their employees — from racism, gender discrimination and other forms of hate they say permeates Oregon’s construction industry.
The Oregon Department of Transportation along the Capitol Mall in Salem, Oregon, Saturday, March 18, 2017.
Bradley W. Parks / OPB
Committee members addressed the comments during a Feb. 3 meeting at which transportation department staff were presenting the results of a survey on policies surrounding disadvantaged business enterprises — firms owned by women and people of color recognized by the government as not being on equal footing with the rest of the industry.
The commenter suggested state programs to support women and BIPOC-owned businesses are “scams” that seek to give “handouts” based on skin color or gender. The full comments can be found here on page 4 under response number 7.
Other members of the committee said they found the comments hateful and disrespectful to the work the committee is trying to achieve. They expressed concern that staff omitted the derogatory comments from the survey results, questioning if staff would’ve addressed them at all if members hadn’t inquired.
The following day, the transportation department’s executive leadership wrote committee members saying the statements were not in line with the agency’s values and that the commenter had been dismissed from the advisory group
However, ODOT refused at the time to release the name of the person or the company they represent.
That information came out on Thursday at a meeting of the advisory board. The commenter was Colby Fleck, a project manager and estimator at Carter & Company from Salem. According to Fleck’s LinkedIn page, he’s been employed there since 2014.
OPB reached Fleck by phone. He said he’d been asked not to comment.
Todd Carter, the owner of Carter & Company, attended Thursday’s meeting and told the committee he initially fired Fleck, but ultimately reversed his decision and will keep him on. Carter said Fleck will undergo training to correct his behavior, but no specifics were given on what training would be required.
Carter also said he’s placing Fleck in charge of helping change the company’s culture so incidents like this don’t happen again.
Committee members appeared somewhat baffled by this.
Twauna Hennessee, who represents the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters on the committee, questioned whether it was a good idea to keep Fleck in a position in which he oversees the estimates of state road contracts and manages projects.
Hennessee said estimators are typically influential in how projects are bid and subcontracted.
Michael Burch, who also represents the council of carpenters but is retired, echoed Hennessee.
“Thinking as a person of color, I would have no respect for him nor you for putting him in charge,” Burch said. “Think about it: you’re putting the person in charge who has created the harm.”
Carter told the committee he would be taking a large role in personally overseeing the process of shifting the company’s culture.
Hennessee said she’s equally concerned that Oregon Transportation Director Kris Strickler didn’t attend Thursday’s meeting, which took place virtually. Hennessee said Strickler has shown up in the past when the committee was dealing with much less serious issues. She took Strickler’s absence as a sign he did not consider what had occurred important enough to attend.
“That’s problematic for me,” she said.
Cooper Brown, the agency’s assistant operations director, who wrote the initial email condemning the derogatory statements, attended the meeting and told the committee that the agency’s top leadership are aware of the issue and taking it seriously.
“ODOT hears you loud and clear,” Brown said.
Committee member Arti O’Brien said she appreciates that Brown and other high-level officials took the time to create space for a conversation about the survey comments to happen. But O’Brien said the problems Oregon’s transportation department has been seeing in implementation of equity policies “stems from a core foundational level.”
“Actions speak louder than words,” O’Brien said. “Not just what has happened here today, but overall, there is a lot more here that needs to be addressed. So let somebody pick up a phone, send an email, set up a time one-on-one if they really care and they really want to make some change.”
Maurice Rahming, committee member and president of O’Neil Construction Group, said that businesses like his and others whose staff are mostly women and people of color have to deal with these types of aggressions every day in Oregon’s construction marketplace.
“We want action,” Rahming said. “We don’t want to sit there and say, ‘well we’re aware of it.’ We want to have these conversations. You need to have some sort of program, you need to come back to this group and say these are our corrective actions.”
Rahming voiced frustration that the agency waited to name Fleck and his affiliation until the committee’s next meeting rather than identifying them immediately so that firms such as his could steer clear of contracts that involve interacting with them.
Both Carter & Company and Fleck have been in charge of high-value road projects in recent years, including the $19 million rebuild of the Interstate 84 Graham Road bridge in Troutdale.
Brown and Maria Ellis, the agency’s economic equity manager, promised the committee they would be reviewing the conversation from Thursday’s meeting and coming back with concrete actions that the state plans to take, but did not give any details about what that might be.