Diane Moca Welcome to Talking Cities Aurora. I'm Diane Moca with today's top headlines, The city of Aurora is not awarding enough government contracts to minority and women-owned businesses according to an extensive analysis. Alderman voted to accept recommendations from the 267-page disparity study that found statistically significant underutilization of minority businesses in five categories: construction, architecture and engineering, professional services, other services, and goods. For instance, the study says 4% of available firms providing goods are minority or women-owned, but the city only paid one-tenth of 1% to such firms for the goods it needed. With professional services, 9% of the businesses available are owned by minorities or women, but only one-fifth of 1% of those contracts went to a woman and none went to minorities. 36% of available architecture and engineering firms are minority or women-owned, but those companies only received 20% of City contracts. The study said the City continues to implement race and gender neutral measures, but those efforts have not been effective in resolving or significantly reducing the identified disparities. The studies 10 recommendations include devoting more resources to establish additional race and gender neutral elements to the city's programs, as well as creating a general outreach campaign and targeted outreach to identify firms that may not be coming to the city so that they are aware of upcoming opportunities. When we asked the City and the Griffin and Strong Law Firm in Atlanta the cost of the study, no one could provide an answer. As National Preparedness Month winds down, the city of Aurora celebrated the men and women who keep us safe during unexpected disasters. At a recent council meeting, city staff talked about the rebranding and new logos for the Aurora Emergency Management Agency and honored 15 of its volunteers. Richard Irvin These are the folks we rely on to make sure that when we get up in the morning, we know everything is going to be in place. If it's not, they're going to make sure that their personnel, whether it's the firemen, whether it's the police officers, or whether it's our emergency management personnel who volunteer to support our first responders, they make sure that we don't have to worry about the things that could scare us because they worry on our behalf. They take care of things on our behalf. Juany Garza Hero for me is helping everyone regardless origin. Heroes. Speaker 4 Nice. Speaker 5 Nice. Speaker 6 Helping everyone regardless of origin. That's powerful. Diane Moca The volunteers contributed more than 5,000 hours of service to the City and its residents. Those are today's trending topics. For Talking Cities Aurora, I'm Diane Moca.