Coral Construction v. City and County of San Francisco CA1/4

I. BACKGROUND

A. The Early Ordinances, Proposition 209, and the Commencement of this Action Between 1984 and 2004 (when its continued enforcement was enjoined), the City operated under several iterations of its Minority/Women/Local Business Utilization Ordinance (Ordinance). In its various forms, the Ordinance called for race- and gender- conscious remedies to ameliorate the effects of past discrimination on minority-owned business enterprises (MBE’s) and women-owned business enterprises (WBE’s) in the awarding of City contracts. (Coral II, supra, 149 Cal.App.4th at p. 1225.) In Coral Construction, the Supreme Court admirably summarized the early history of the Ordinance and related developments in the law of preferences as follows: “The City’s first MBE/WBE ordinance, adopted in 1984, set aside specified percentages of public contracting dollars for MBE’s and WBE’s. The ordinance also gave bid discounts, which required the City’s contracting authorities to treat bids by MBE’s and WBE’s as if they were lower than they in fact were. Both the set-asides and the bid discounts afforded MBE’s and WBE’s a competitive advantage over other bidders. “In 1989, the United States Court…