Affirmative Action is being sorely tested in the San Francisco Bay Area these days. Proposition 209, which "gutted" affirmative action in California in 1996 leaving white male-owned businesses with 95% of state contracts, has also left its adverse impact on federally funded projects.

Prime contractor, Kiewit/ KJ/ Manson, won the first bid on the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge of a billion dollars and only one Black contractor was included at $100,000 insulting the 40% Black population of Oakland. With federal dollars, which are unaffected by State Prop. 209, Caltrans had originally set the goal for minority and women participation at 24%, but later cut it in half to 12%. The final result was 4%, consisting mostly of white women.

Also, the federally funded $700 million 3rd Street Light Rail Project in San Francisco runs directly through the Black neighborhood of Bayview Hunter's Point, with little possibility that Black contractors will be included. The Black community has essentially stopped the project for the lack of inclusion of the African American community.

Across the bay, the $1.3 billion Oakland International Airport Terminal Expansion Project, restricted by Prop 200 in minority business inclusion, is attempting to give preference to the local downtown businesses, which have a t high concentration of Black firms. However, the smallest contract is $24 million under the Master Builder/Design-Build Concept established by the Port of Oakland Commission. Black contractors are only able to bid and bond a maximum of $3 to $4 million. Figure that one out?

Moving to the state level, civil rights groups, UC faculty and -policy researchers are seriously concerned about Black UC Regent Ward Connerly's November 2002 ballot initiative. "The Racial Privacy Initiative" would ban most state and local agencies from collecting individual racial and ethnic information. Aimed at keeping Black and Latino students out of the UC system, it would also eliminate the monitoring of racial discrimination devastate social science and public policy benefiting Blacks and other minorities and prevent UC from getting federal research grants and con~ that require ethnicity on race data.

Governor Davis has been embarrassed by the initiative because his recent Regent appointee John Moores, owner of the San Diego Padres baseball team and new Regent Chairman, held a $10,000 fund raiser for the initiative in January and Regent Peter Preuss contributed $10,000 to the initiative. But San Franciscan Richard Blum, Governor Davis's latest UC Regent Appointee and husband of California Senator Dianne Feinstein, has stated his opposition to the Initiative. "I have been fighting for civil rights all my life and my philosophy is almost identical to that of my wife, Dianne," states Blum: Blum has worked with the Senator in fervently opposing the passage of Prop 209, established programs for African Americans in South Central Los Angeles and Watts, and helped lead a San Francisco delegation to Africa for the establishment of the San Francisco-Abidjan Sister City Relationship... perhaps the pendulum will begin to swing the other way.