St. Paul’s reparations commission plans to contract with a research company for a “harm study” examining the impact of “historic and ongoing harms” suffered by the city’s Black descendants of chattel slavery, an undertaking budgeted for up to $250,000.
While the city council appears to be on board, the evaluation process surrounding competing research proposals recently drew objections from some of the city’s Black elders, as well as the city council’s two Black members, who were of opposite minds about a full restart.
The city’s request for proposals for a researcher closed on Oct. 3 after being extended in September because it had drawn just a single response. Three research companies have since responded to the solicitation, though details have yet to be made public. While a single appointee from the 11-member reparations commission served on the evaluation committee, the contract selection — which has been made but not finalized — is otherwise being led by city staff according to the city’s procurement guidelines, which include scoring and ranking, and will ultimately be finalized by the city council.
Marvin Roger Anderson, chair of the Rondo Center of Diverse Expressions, wrote to the city on Nov. 4 that many Black-led organizations like his own were not aware of the RFP until it was published.
“It is troubling that city staff — representing institutions directly tied to historic policies of displacement and exclusion — are solely responsible for administering and evaluating proposals,” Anderson wrote. “This creates a conflict of interest that compromises the credibility and independence of the study.”
Regina Jackson and Arthur Ray McCoy, who both serve on the reparations commission, recently called for the city council to put the request for proposals on hold and redesign the selection process, which is almost complete.
“There’s been a selection made, but there hasn’t been a contract put in place,” said council member Anika Bowie, in an interview Monday. “I’m not objecting to who got selected. But the city should have been guiding that process, not the one that makes that decision for them. That selection should have been made by the reparations commission, not by city staff.”
Selection process
The prospect of redesigning a selection process at more than mid-stream has alarmed city staff and raised concerns about legal exposure.
On Nov. 5, Bowie presented the city council with a resolution that would have established a citizen-driven review committee to evaluate the proposals, with members largely recruited from community groups, as well as staff or interns from her Ward 1 office and council member Cheniqua Johnson’s Ward 7 office.
Her resolution was effectively voted down by the city council, at Johnson’s urging. Instead, it was replaced on a 6-1 vote with the original timeline and staff-driven review process recommended to the council by the commission itself.
Johnson noted that the 11-member reparations commission, appointed by the council in 2023, adopted a framework and scope of work around the request for proposals in April and the city then published the request for proposal in August with a traditional review process in mind.
Confusion for city staff
Bowie’s resolution, which would upend the selection process already underway, “created so much confusion for staff and for my community,” Johnson told the council last week. “It poses a real legal, financial and procedural risk that if left uncorrected, could jeopardize our entire (project).”
Bowie’s proposal had called for the reparations commission to appoint five community members who are not city staff to the evaluation committee, including at least one descendant of the Rondo neighborhood. They would join a legislative aide from the Ward 7 office, a graduate intern appointed by the Ward 1 office, the city council staff director, the executive assistant to the reparations commission, and an appointee of the commission chair. Under her resolution, the committee’s recommendation would be due back to the commission by Dec. 31.
Johnson’s “version two” resolution — which eliminates long sections of the Bowie text and replaces it with her own — drew the support of the rest of the city council, which voted 6-1 to adopt it as an amendment to Bowie’s resolution, over Bowie’s objections.
Among the differences, Johnson’s resolution calls for the city council to hire the study partner, making the final selection after city staff ensure the proposals have been reviewed according to the city’s formal scoring and procurement process, with input from the reparations commission.
The timeline
Bowie said key voices in the Black community were unaware of the request for proposals until the selection was almost complete and had been left out, including the African-American Leadership Council, the St. Paul NAACP, the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center and the Aurora St. Anthony Neighborhood Development Corporation.
Those groups “were not even aware of the timeline,” said Bowie, during last Wednesday’s council meeting. “They have never seen the RFP. … How is it that we are having a harm study report that’s based on reparations, but yet the community that’s been most impacted are not even made aware?”
Bowie said the city council itself had not been kept abreast of the harm study, and even some members of the reparations commission had been surprised to discover late in the process that reparations chair Trahern Crews had appointed commission member Jeremie English onto the evaluation committee.
Johnson and fellow council members Nelsie Yang and HwaJeong Kim said they’d received individual updates about the harm study and felt it was time to move forward.
Confident in the process
Crews, in a phone interview Monday, agreed that further delay would impede progress.
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“We did our job getting the word out about the RFP,” Crews said. “(The RFP deadline) was at least extended by two weeks. … We’re excited the way things are going.”
On Friday, council President Rebecca Noecker noted that Johnson has been “very engaged in the work of the commission” and she was comfortable with the outcome of the vote.
“I take issue with many of the things that were said at the table about the lack of process or lack of fairness,” Noecker said. “I feel really confident in the process that we’ve run.”
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