Module 5 · Methodology & legal framework
How it was built, and where the line is
This page is the honesty layer. It explains the preliminary read in plain language, names every source, states the limits of public data, and sets out the constitutional standard a defensible Maryland disparity study must meet.
The disparity index in plain language
The disparity index divides utilization by availability. Availability is a group's share of the firms in the market. Utilization is that group's share of the dollars spent. If a group is 30% of firms and wins 30% of dollars, the index is 1.0, parity.
An index of 0.50 means a group wins half the work its presence in the market would predict. Across disparity studies, an index below 0.80 is treated as substantial underutilization. The City's 2021 study used this construction and found statistically significant MWBE underutilization in all five of its procurement categories for FY2014 through FY2018.
Industry-category crosswalk
Categories follow the five the City's 2021 study measured and its aspirational goals still track, mapped to NAICS sectors so public availability data and the City's spend picture line up, and so the update reads against the baseline grid.
| Construction | NAICS 23 |
| Architecture & Engineering | NAICS 5413 |
| Professional Services | NAICS 54 (excl. 5413) |
| Other Services | NAICS 56, 81, 48-49 |
| Goods & Supplies | NAICS 31-33, 42, 44-45 |
Provenance
Every figure traces to a public source
These are the datasets behind the portal, each retrieved and cached to static JSON at build time. No government endpoint is called at runtime.
U.S. Census Annual Business Survey (ABS), Company Summary 2022
2026-08-16Employer-firm counts by owner sex, ethnicity, race, and veteran status, cross-tabbed by 2022 NAICS sector and geography. Reference year 2022, released Dec 2024. Shares computed on the total-firm base; suppressed cells treated as null, never zero; ownership groups overlap and are never summed.
www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/abs/data/2022/AB220U.S. Census Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics 2022 (NES-D)
2026-08-16Nonemployer-firm counts by owner demographics. The Frederick County nonemployer universe (25,500 firms) is far more diverse than the employer universe at every geography, which matters for small-purchase and quote-level availability design, including the City's Small Business Reserve band.
www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/abs/data/2022/AB2202021 City of Frederick Disparity Study (Griffin & Strong, P.C.)
2026-08-16The City's 2021 study, the baseline this portal reads: FY2014-FY2018, $91.2M in prime spend analyzed, market area drawn on the Washington-Baltimore-Arlington CSA to capture at least 75 percent of prime award dollars; findings presented March 2021. All baseline availability, utilization, and disparity figures are the study's own, from the report and its Appendix F.
cityoffrederickmd.gov/DocumentCenter/View/18690City of Frederick MWBE and Small Business Reserve program record
2026-08-16The City's MWBE program page, Small Businesses page, the 2026 MWBE/SBR form, and the first annual program review (2022 data) as publicly reported: about 20 percent of $44M in procurement spend to small, women-owned, or minority-owned firms; 154 SBEs certified since January 2022. The City's web pages and the 2026 form state the SBR band differently; the discrepancy is flagged wherever the band appears. No FY23-FY25 annual reports or utilization dashboard were found published.
www.cityoffrederickmd.gov/1551/MWBE-ProgramFrederick County Government Disparity Study, March 2026 (MGT Impact Solutions)
2026-08-16A separate government's first-ever disparity study, used here strictly as a benchmark and cautionary tale: combined disparity index 24.22 on five years of data, yet the legal threshold for race- and gender-conscious remedies was not met because only 27 percent of prime contractors kept subcontractor records. Never a City of Frederick finding.
www.frederickcountymd.govMaryland HB 1578 (2026) and the 2025 statewide MBE disparity study (MGT)
2026-08-16Reauthorizes the state MBE program to July 1, 2031 on the strength of the 2025 statewide study (26.1 percent availability vs 15.2 percent of award value) and codifies race-neutral-first: race-neutral efforts used to the maximum extent feasible. Context only: Croson requires the City of Frederick's own record, never the state's.
mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/hCity of Frederick budget and OpenGov transparency record
2026-08-16FY27 adopted budget about $293.7M all funds / $182M General Fund; about $44M in procurement spend (2022, the only public figure, flagged as dated). The City moved procurement to OpenGov effective January 1, 2026, so the update's five-year study period will straddle the IonWave-to-OpenGov migration: a named data-collection complication.
stories.opengov.com/frederickmdCity of Frederick forthcoming RFP (draft under review)
2026-08-16Supplier Diversity Programs Assessment, Disparity Study, and Strategic Implementation Plan. No RFP number and no due date yet as of 2026-08-16. Watch the City's OpenGov portal and the monthly procurement forecasting page (cityoffrederickmd.gov/1632).
procurement.opengov.com/portal/cityoffrederickmdU.S. Census cartographic county boundaries (Plotly / TIGER)
2026-08-16County polygons for the market-area map.
raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/geoGoverning legal framework
What a constitutionally defensible study must satisfy
Race-conscious public contracting measures face strict scrutiny. A jurisdiction must show a strong basis in evidence of identified discrimination in its own market, typically a disparity study, and must narrowly tailor any remedy. A statistical gap is the starting point, not the conclusion, and the evidence must be the City's own: state and county studies are context, never the basis.
The controlling appellate precedent for a Maryland program, because Frederick sits in the Fourth Circuit. The court upheld race-conscious measures only for the groups whose evidence showed controlled, statistically significant disparities, and struck them for the rest. Its record also credited evidence of an informal, racially exclusive network, the same mechanism the City's own 2021 study described in its anecdotal findings. This case is the design spec the update is built to.
Neither is a contracting case, but together they define the current climate: the Court keeps narrowing the space where race-based state action survives, and keeps pushing the evidentiary demand toward identified, intentional discrimination rather than statistical effect alone. A record built for that climate, controlled, group-specific, and corroborated, is the only durable kind.
A federal court permanently enjoined the race-based provisions of Houston's MBE contracting program, finding no evidence tying the program to identified discrimination in the city's own contracting. Houston commissioned a new disparity study mid-litigation to defend the program and lost anyway. The lesson is structural: evidence must precede remedy. A study procured to justify an operating program is far weaker than a study that gates what the program becomes. Frederick is proceeding in the right order.
Maryland reauthorized its state MBE program on the strength of a fresh 2025 statewide disparity study, and wrote the modern posture into statute: race-neutral efforts “will be used to the maximum extent feasible” with race-conscious measures only where necessary. The state ecosystem is favorable context for Frederick, but Croson still requires the City's own record: the statewide study is a benchmark to compare against, never the City's strong basis.
USDOT removed every race- and sex-based presumption from the federal DBE program, and the litigation challenging the old regime was dismissed as moot in March 2026. Two consequences discipline this study: the federal DBE framework is never cited as support for a local race-conscious program, and state MBE certification and federal DBE certification are kept strictly separate in the data, because their legal bases have diverged.
Frederick sits in the Fourth Circuit, which means the controlling standard is unusually concrete: H.B. Rowe tells a Maryland jurisdiction exactly what survives and what gets struck. A preliminary read from public data cannot meet that bar. It can show where to look. A defensible study pairs availability and utilization with statistical significance testing cell by cell, verified anecdotal evidence, and narrowly tailored, group-specific recommendations, race-neutral first. And because the Maryland Public Information Act governs the City's records, the study's data handling and methodology are written to be reproducible under it: any figure the report states, a reviewer should be able to trace and rebuild.
Case-tested outside counsel
Kevin V. Parsons
Parsons served as counsel for the challenger in H.B. Rowe, the case that controls in the Fourth Circuit where Frederick sits, so he has pressed the exact attack a Maryland disparity-study record must survive. For Frederick, he reviews the design, preliminary findings, and proposed remedies against that controlling standard, then authors and signs the final defensibility opinion. The City's draft scope excludes legal advice from the study; this seat is defensibility review of the record itself.
- It uses equal-weight public firm counts, not a capacity- and willingness-adjusted availability survey.
- It has no current utilization series: the City publishes no transaction-level payment or award data, so utilization after FY2018 rests on the 2021 study's published grid and the single combined figure in the City's 2022 program review, which are different measures.
- It sees prime-level activity only. Subcontractor participation is invisible to public data, and the 2021 study found zero tracked subcontractors in FY2018.
- It has no bid or lost-contract data, so it cannot separate a supply gap from a selection gap.
- County-level ABS sector cells are heavily suppressed (Construction has no publishable minority firm count), so category-level availability leans on wider geographies.
- It applies no statistical significance test to current-period figures and carries no anecdotal record of its own.
The method spine
What the full study adds that public data cannot
This is both the limit of this portal and the work House Strategies Group would lead as the study's authors: six load-bearing components, each built to the Fourth Circuit standard.