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Of course Gabriela Santiago-Romero is ignoring the petition from Black Tech Saturdays [1]
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Date: 2025-03-19
So it looks like the City of Detroit is considering a $200,000 pilot tech grant program. It’s a start, I suppose. I would suggest $1 million would be better, but City Council just doesn’t listen to me.
Not Councilman-at-large Coleman Young II, not Councilwoman-at-large Mary Waters, and least of all, the extremely dishonest and deceitful Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago-Romero, who sheds crocodile tears for undocumented immigrants but doesn’t do a damn thing to help any kind of immigrant. With her effortless lying and grandstanding, she would be more at home in the Republican Party.
I try to talk to elected officials and their staff members about the problems Detroiters face trying to start tech businesses or trying enter the tech workforce, but the elected officials just don’t want to be bothered with any of it.
A few of them blurt out that I should talk to Black Tech Saturdays about this. As if the entire responsibility for tech business development and tech workforce development was strictly only the responsibility of Black Tech Saturdays, and theirs alone. We must not step on the toes of Black Tech Saturdays! Therefore we must do nothing at all!
Newsflash for elected officials: Tech business development and tech workforce development is a shared responsibility and you have failed to do your part.
Hell, even some people from foundations automatically and unthinkingly route any inquiries on this matter to Black Tech Saturdays. It’s like someone decided that Black Tech Saturdays is nothing more than a safety valve allowing black software developers to vent their frustration at not being able to obtain fulfilling employment as software developers, and for black entrepreneurs to vent their frustration at not being able to get capital to start their businesses.
Black Tech Saturdays started out in 2023 as a meet-up of a few people at Newlab, near the Michigan Central Station. When I first heard about it, they had taken a group shot of a couple of dozen people at the bottom of a staircase.
The group shot on the staircase remains an important part of the Black Tech Saturdays event liturgy, but now they more than fill up the staircase. I think the first time I was in one of those group shots they could only fill up the staircase halfway, they had to tell some people to come down a few steps. Now I don’t even try to get in the staircase group shot.
Events are roughly monthly, almost always on Saturdays. I would lowball attendance to the most recent event at 500. The event coming up this Saturday could easily draw a thousand people.
In the beginning, I could talk directly to Johnny and Alexa Turnage, the founders of Black Tech Saturdays, and I did a few times. Now, I just can't, it would be like me trying to talk to the pastor of a megachurch. It’s not gonna happen.
With all these politicians and foundations deferring (or more appropriately, deflecting) to Black Tech Saturdays, a lot of people are asking if Black Tech Saturdays could do more than they’re doing. Maybe they can.
But then we need to ask: could the state and city governments do more than they’re doing? And the answer is clearly and unequivocally yes, a hell of lot more. If you’re going to complain about Detroit and Michigan losing tech talent to other states, then you need to ask yourself what, if anything, you are doing to encourage that tech talent to stay here.
Without Black Tech Saturdays, a lot of tech talent here in Detroit would simply not get any encouragement whatsoever.
But this is not a burden that Black Tech Saturdays can or should bear alone. So Alexa and Johnny decided to ask Detroit’s City Council to start pitching in, like City Council should have been doing all this time already.
The petition on change.org has more than 120 signatures so far, including mine.
The City of Detroit’s current budget proposes a $200,000 pilot tech grant program—a critical first step in ensuring Detroit-based tech companies have opportunities to provide solutions for the city, open doors for more government contracts, and be considered as key players in Detroit’s economic future. We are asking that this funding be increased to $500,000—matching similar first-year investments like the Detroit Legacy Business Fund. We know $500,000 isn’t everything. We know we deserve more. But we also know that the first step in growing the resources Detroit founders need is creating the pot in the first place. Right now, Detroit’s tech entrepreneurs don’t just need to be invited to the table—they need capital to build the table themselves. This is about more than just funding. This is about Detroit leading. It’s about making sure that our talent, our ideas, and our solutions aren’t overlooked. That the next wave of innovation doesn’t happen in someone else’s city—it happens here. Signing this petition means standing in solidarity with a movement that is working to build generational wealth, economic mobility, and representation in spaces where we have historically been shut out. We know that success in this space is about how many swings at bat you get. And you can’t take a swing if you don’t have capital. This is just the beginning. The City Council has the power to tell Detroit—and the world—that they believe in a tech-enabled future for this city. Let’s make sure they hear us loud and clear.
The petition is addressed to City Council, with Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago-Romero being listed first. I don’t know if that was on purpose or if it was just due to some random number generator sorting her before the others.
It’s appropriate, though, because of all the current councilmembers, Gabriela Santiago-Romero is the one who has the most actively and consciously acted to forbid blacks and Latinos from getting into tech.
Before she was on City Council, Santiago-Romero was the so-called “diversity coordinator” at Grand Circus, a so-called “boot camp” for software developers, where she did her part to keep the enrollment of blacks and Latinos as low as possible. She has given excuses for this, but never on the record.
And now on City Council, she’s giving cover to the fraud of Detroit at Work, an organization that supposedly helps Detroiters get jobs, but strictly reserves software developer job opportunities for white male clients, and forbids them to women, black and Latino clients.
The most galling example of Santiago-Romero’s grandstanding and deceitfulness is the $5 million contract to Motorola for license plate readers. It is true that she voted against it, and she had legitimate reasons to oppose it. But her opposition was deliberately ineffectual, she made no effort whatsoever to convince the other councilmembers to vote against it with her. Or maybe she did, but then what reason is there for her to block my FOIA request on this specific matter? Other than her arrogance, none.
I’ve been told, but I have not been able to verify, that some other council members asked Motorola that Detroit’s license plate reader data not be shared with any law enforcement agency other than the Detroit Police Department, and Motorola agreed. Which would mean that everything Santiago-Romero said about this on the record was pure grandstanding for the cameras.
I could have done the license plate reader contract for $1 million. I know an American-born Mexican woman, call her “Lisa Perez,” who is a genius at optical character recognition programs. A team with her and a couple other people, like maybe people who attend Black Tech Saturdays events, would have been able to deliver a license plate reader program that ensures that only Detroit Police can access the license plate data, and not Border Patrol nor any other entities.
Well, Lisa Perez has decided to go live in Mexico. It’s mostly because of the federal government here. She doesn’t want to hide in an attic and write a diary like Anne Frank. But even if that wasn’t a factor, what enticement or encouragement is there for Lisa Perez to stay in Detroit? Certainly none from Gabriela Santiago-Romero, who says with her actions and inactions that Lisa Perez’s skills as a software developer are worthless and unimportant.
By the way, Santiago-Romero is safe from recall. I honestly thought the limitation on recalls was the last six months of an official’s term and the first six. That’s what I thought when I filed a petition last month to have her recalled for embezzling taxpayer money to fund the creation and distribution of her re-election campaign materials in December of last year.
But it’s actually a full year, so the Wayne County Election Commission was spared having to put on the charade of rejecting my recall petition for “lack of clarity.” The other reason to reject a recall petition is for not being factual, but the commission don’t like to use that reason because facts are much easier to argue in court than a supposed lack of clarity.
None of the other council members have replied to the change.org petition as of yet. But I’m a lot more willing to cut them slack because they’re not the ones who have explicitly refused to listen to me for the past four years. Santiago-Romero has decided that she’s way too important, and that I, one of her constituents, is not important at all.
But now let’s see if she has the guts to tell Black Tech Saturdays and however many people sign the change.org petition that she’s too busy and too important to bother at least saying a few empty platitudes.
Please sign the change.org petition. Hopefully the other councilmembers will agree. We can get this done without Santiago-Romero.
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