Minority construction contractors in Connecticut say they’re getting shafted by state officials as departments push major projects toward big general contractors who then undercut or push them out, and because the majority of pre-qualified construction companies that are “certified minority businesses,” are technically owned by white women.

Speaking during public comment before the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority (CHFA), Bernard Thomas, chairman of the Connecticut Minority Construction Council, joined with affordable housing developer Harold Foley in calling for the CHFA to suspend its affordable housing financing awards until they can find a way to address the disparity between state contracting requirements and the reality for minority-owned construction businesses.

“When we sit there and want to use the words ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ we are not doing what we say we are doing,” Thomas said to the board. “Our minority contractors feel they don’t get access to the work and if they do get access, it’s very minimum.”

“We’re providing services for urban areas, and we have minority contractors who are not able to service those groups,” Thomas continued. “This has been going on and on for a while.”

Behind the scenes, Thomas has been making the rounds at the capitol, meeting with state lawmakers and pressing his case that, despite the good intentions of Connecticut’s regulations regarding minority contractors, the program isn’t accomplishing its goals.

Under state law, the state and municipalities must “set as an annual goal their intention to contract with certified small contractors at least 25% of their total projected annual expenditures,” and a quarter of those contracts, roughly 6.8 percent, are to be with “certified minority businesses,” according to the Commission of Human Rights and Opportunities, which is responsible for reviewing the contracts and enforcing the equal opportunity compliance laws.

While those figures are, by the stated language, aspirational “goals,” and based on the “intention” of a public department, according to a massive 2024 Statewide Disparity Study issued by the CHRO which found that, despite the state’s goal to award more contracts to minority owned businesses, it is failing and that being a minority owned business “continues to have an adverse impact on a firm’s ability to secure contracting opportunities with the State of Connecticut.”

Among some of the more notable findings in the study was that obtaining pre-qualification status from the state is a barrier to entry, that state departments skirt requirements by saying there are no minority owned businesses who can perform the work or supply the materials, and that some minority businesses are “inappropriately certified as such.” 

Minority contractors who spoke with Inside Investigator off the record for fear of being denied future contracts describe situations in which they are asked by the state or a municipality to give a scope and estimate on a project but are then not allowed to bid on it; that they are undercut by general contractors to the point that the project no longer becomes profitable, and that municipalities are using pre-bid walk-through sign-in sheets as proof they made a good faith effort to meet their minority contracting goals, rather than actually working with the minority contractors.

“You have a governor who has individuals that are in place who are not adhering to the rules and regulations,” Thomas said in an interview with Inside Investigator. “You cannot talk about equity and inclusion when you have commissioners not abiding by those rules. Our minority contractors have lost billions of dollars over the last twenty to twenty-five years because of the incompetence of commissioners not making sure the people they have in place make sure our contractors get their fair share.” 

Among the concerns expressed by the contractors and Thomas in his comments before the CHFA, is the preference for general contractors as opposed to construction managers. General contractors, the minority construction business owners argue, undercut them as subcontractors to boost their profits, whereas construction managers allow visibility into costs, giving subcontractors more transparency during the bidding and building phase of a project. 

The minority contractors Inside Investigator spoke with said budget transparency for projects keeps them from being “beat up” by general contractors pushing them into tighter margins, and that after the work is completed, they sometimes wait months for payment; one contractor said he waited a year for a six-figure payment.

A spreadsheet of affordable housing projects that received the competitive 9 percent Low Income Housing Tax Credits awarded by CHFA provided by Thomas, shows that of thirty-three completed and pending projects between 2022 and 2024, only two involve a construction manager. The rest were completed by general contractors, with Haynes Construction receiving the largest share of the work with nine projects.

Another contractor described how they were denied a bid on a Housing and Urban Development project that he had designed, budgeted, and put together with approval by the state. But when he tried to bid to do the project, he was rejected purportedly because his company wasn’t “qualified.”

Connecticut regulations say that to bid on a public project over $1 million, the bidder must be prequalified by the Department of Administrative Services (DAS), which requires a tax status letter, company financial statement, letter from a bonding company, experience ratings and company safety manual. The initial fees range from $600 to $2,500, depending on how large a project a company wants to prequalify for.

These are all issues previously listed as problems in the 2024 Disparity Study, which found the state’s qualification process presents a barrier to entry and that there were long wait times for payment from contractors to minority business owners.

However, likely the easiest to understand issue brought up by Thomas was how Connecticut classifies businesses as “minority owned.” 

To qualify as minority owned, the company must show that 51 percent of the business is owned by a minority – defined as Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, American Indian, or disabled. But the designation also applies to white women, leading some white, male company owners to allegedly place the company in their wives’ names to attain minority business status.

A review of the pre-qualified construction contractors listed by DAS as MBEs – Minority Business Enterprises – showed that 68.5 percent were owned by non-minority women. Several of the stated female owners who have a 51 percent stake in the company are married to the men who, according to state business records, started the company and ran it for years. 

Under state regulations, the company must also show that the listed business owner is actively engaged in running the business, but that appears not to be the case in some instances.

Upon going to their websites, some construction companies drop the pretense and just list the man as the owner; searches for some of the purported female owners showed one working as a hair stylist; another lists an entirely different job on her LinkedIn profile; one company is purportedly run by an actress and former state university theater director, and several contain no information about the woman majority owner at all but plenty of information about their husband as the owner. Indeed, the men are listed as the owners on other websites.

One company outright says that the company’s long-term president’s wife took over as president in 2013 after retiring as a schoolteacher and helped the company “attain women-owned business certification.”

Of the total 1,188 businesses listed as MBEs on DAS’s Small Business Certification Directory, which includes businesses engaged in all sorts of industries, 57 percent, were listed as woman owned, however, wthat also includes businesses that are owned by women identified as racial minorities as well.

“With respect to certification, staff interviews raised concerns about fronts which are primarily that Non-minority women owned firms may not be truly owned and/or controlled by a woman, thus inappropriately being certified as such for the purpose of participating in the Set-Aside Program,” the 2024 Disparity Study said, which found 34 percent of businesses surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed that some businesses were using a “front” to take advantage of minority business status. Only 6.8 percent disagreed, with the rest remaining neutral.

Although the CHRO is technically in charge of enforcing minority business regulations, Thomas says it is also incumbent on DAS to ensure businesses they certify as minority owned are, in fact, owned by minorities.

“To mix white women with minorities takes even more away from our minority Black and Brown contractors,” Thomas said. “When you go check it is clearly lopsided, and even when information is brought forward, everyone wants to turn a blind eye and not make the necessary changes to make things correct.”

Despite the findings of the disparity study and Thomas’s assertions, the CHRO, in their 2025 report to the General Assembly, touted numbers showing the amount of money going to MBEs from state contracts wildly exceeding the state’s regulatory goals by an average of 310 percent going back as far as 2016.

During the 2025 session, some changes to the MBE set aside program were passed as part of the budget implementer by replacing the 25 percent set aside for small businesses and MBEs with “spending allocation goals for goods and services by industry category,” and “contract specific spending allocation goals for public works contracts, based on the percentage of available businesses” in the area, according to the Office of Legislative Research.

The law that passed was part of a separate bill – Senate Bill 1518 – which was roundly denounced by the former executive director of the Minority Construction Council and Thomas in his capacity as a business owner. Further opposition from DAS and the Connecticut Construction Industries Association hinged on the lack of adequate data to determine the extent to which minority business were being used as subcontractors and the inability to meet some of the demands in the bill, such as determining the total value of contracts and the number of “available businesses.”

According to data from CHRO, so far in 2026, state agencies have spent a total of $110 million on MBEs, meeting on average 68 percent of the state’s spending and allocation goals. Thomas, however, believes these numbers are “skewed” because the underlying reality is that many of those businesses are owned by white women. 

“I can tell you from all our contractors and from the Minority Construction Council, I’d like to know how many of those a truly legit,” Thomas said. “We are definitely not getting our percentage.”

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