Gayanga Co. was a Detroit-headquartered, Black-owned heavy civil and demolition contractor founded to create real careers for the people who lived in the neighborhoods we rebuilt. From 2016 to 2026 we grew a 32-home residential demolition contract into the largest Black-owned heavy civil and demolition firm in Michigan — more than $80 million of work, every dollar of it competitively bid. This page is the record of what we built, who we built it with, how we won the work, and what happened at the end.
2016Founded in Detroit
≈2,500Structures demolished
$80M+In contract awards, including joint ventures — every City contract competitively bid
78Union-scale employees at our 2024 peak
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01The Name
A name that means self-determination.
Gayanga took its name from Gaspar Yanga, who led a colony of escaped enslaved Africans in Mexico during Spanish colonial rule in the 16th and 17th centuries. Yanga instilled a passion for liberty and self-determination in his people, and his community became the first free colony of Africans in North America.
Too many "Black-owned" construction companies are Black in name only.
A Black name on the truck. A Black founder at the press conference. And a company that is white where it counts — who owns the equipment, who runs the crews, who keeps the profit. The neighborhood gets nothing.
Gayanga was named so it could never be that.
Self-determination meant Black ownership that owned the work: its own crews, its own iron, its own estimators, its own decisions. It was never only about tearing buildings down. It was about who got to do the work, who got paid a living wage for it, and who got to say they built something in their own city.
Gayanga Co. was a place where people built their dreams. Our focus was on people. We weren't solely creating jobs — we were creating opportunities.Brian McKinney Sr., Founder & CEO
02The Founding
Founded in 2016 to close a gap Detroit could see from every block.
Detroit was running the largest residential demolition program in the country. Thousands of blighted homes were coming down and the money was real. But very few of the firms doing the work were owned by Detroiters, and very few of the crews came from the neighborhoods being cleared. The Detroit Free Press documented it in 2018: in a majority-Black city, the demolition money was going overwhelmingly to large firms from outside it.
Brian McKinney, a native Detroiter who had spent years in the technology startup industry before coming home, founded Gayanga Co. in 2016 as a certified minority-owned construction engineering firm headquartered in the city. The idea was simple: if Detroit was going to be rebuilt, Detroiters should be the ones getting hired, trained, and paid to do it.
It was not easy to get in. Detroit was the only municipality in Michigan that required its own demolition license, and the board that reviewed a new applicant was made up largely of the contractors it would be bidding against. A new Black-owned company with no track record had to be bonded before it could bid a single group of houses.
MAY 2016
The Minority Contractors FairOf more than 400 participants at the City of Detroit Minority Contractors Fair hosted by Mayor Duggan and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Gayanga Co. was the only firm to follow through and become licensed by the City to perform demolition.
SEPT 2017
Demo Day — the first contract32 unfit homes for the Detroit Land Bank Authority under the Hardest Hit Fund, a contract of roughly $500,000. Gayanga's crews started on Detroit's east side and never left.
2017
Union before the first house came downSignatory contractor with Operating Engineers Local 324 and Laborers Local 1191 before the first house came down — union wages, union healthcare, union pension, union training for every field position.
The first crew, Detroit, 2017
03How We Grew
From 32 houses to the largest Black-owned heavy civil and demolition contractor in Michigan.
Growth came one bid at a time: 32 homes in the last quarter of 2017, 186 in 2018, more than 400 a year in 2019 and 2020. City work went from a $500,000 first contract to $17 million in 2021; annual revenue grew from about $450,000 in 2017 to nearly $18 million in 2024; bonding capacity from $3.5 million to $12 million. And the work grew beyond demolition — water mains, earthwork, site development, industrial work for Marathon and DTE, and joint ventures on some of the biggest projects in the city, with an in-house engineering and estimating team to win it.
32 → 400+
Homes demolished per year, 2017 to 2019
$500K → $17M
Annual City contract work, 2017 to 2021
$450K → $18M
Annual revenue, 2017 to 2024
$12M
Bonding capacity by 2025, up from $3.5M at the start
2016
Gayanga Co. was founded
Detroit-headquartered, certified minority-owned, licensed by the State of Michigan and the City of Detroit.
2017
First demolitions for the Detroit Land Bank
32 homes under the Hardest Hit Fund. Gayanga began hiring from the neighborhoods where it worked.
2018
The year of surviving
The first 32 homes were also nearly the last. The federal Hardest Hit Fund money was going overwhelmingly to large non-minority firms, and when Gayanga said so publicly — to the Free Press — the Land Bank's bidding rules changed in ways that shut the company out of the regular bid groups. For nearly two years Gayanga lived on emergency demolitions and on a water contract it won on its own: sole contractor disconnecting water lines and pumping out flooded basements for the Detroit Building Authority's blight program — more than 700 under a $2.2 million contract. The DBA kept Gayanga on when the contract moved to the City in 2020, extended it into 2021, and then awarded a new $2.25 million Water Related Services contract. It was Gayanga's first underground utility work, and those crews became the company's water main and excavation teams. 186 homes demolished.
2019
Gordie Howe Bridge, Woodland, Conners Creek
Gayanga was selected directly by BNA Constructors, the joint venture building the Gordie Howe International Bridge, for clearing, grubbing, and grading of the 160-acre U.S. port-of-entry site; took the five-story Historic Woodland apartment building down in 10 days; and handled demolition, contaminated-soil removal, and ash-basin backfill at DTE's Conners Creek Power Plant — a job DTE marked with commemorative awards to the project team. 400-plus homes demolished. Brian McKinney named to Crain's 40 Under 40.
2020
Proposal N
After City Council rejected the Mayor's first $250 million blight bond in November 2019, Gayanga's leadership and a coalition of Black contractors stood with Council members at a July 2020 press conference to push a rewritten proposal built around Detroit jobs and Detroit businesses. Council put Proposal N on the ballot that week, and voters approved it that November: $250 million to demolish or stabilize 16,000 vacant houses, with a 30 percent set-aside for Detroit small businesses and a 51 percent Detroit-resident hiring target. Mayor Duggan publicly credited Gayanga's CEO for helping get it passed. In December Gayanga worked with Council and Locals 324 and 1191 on the Construction Project Equalization Credit amendments that gave Detroit-based union contractors a fair shot. The same year it formed its first joint ventures with Major Cement — the start of the civil business, and of a partnership that lasted the rest of the company's life.
2022
$18.45 million in Proposal N awards
BridgeDetroit's breakdown of Proposal N data showed Gayanga holding six contracts worth about $18.45 million — the most of any contractor in the program. Marathon Petroleum brought Gayanga on as its prime demolition contractor for the Boynton neighborhood property program beside the Detroit refinery — private industrial work that continued through 2025. The Major joint venture — now Major Contracting — added the West Warren and East Warren streetscapes. A three-year DWSD water contract followed. The Workforce Development Program graduated its first cohort.
2023
The back office comes of age
Gayanga had been building its back office since 2020 — recruiting field and office leaders from Independence Excavating, Homrich, Barton Malow, Detroit Dismantling, and the City itself. In 2023 the key pieces landed: the City's Deputy CFO came over as CFO, the compliance specialist was hired out of the City's own demolition compliance department, and the safety and environmental compliance manager had full authority over every site. 70 employees on payroll.
2024
Peak
78 employees, $3.3 million in payroll, and a network of Detroit-based trucking, abatement, and concrete subcontractors working alongside Gayanga. Henry Ford Health selected Gayanga as a minority partner on its Destination: Grand campus expansion.
2025
The joint ventures
Gayanga and Major Contracting were awarded roughly $43 million of Detroit Water & Sewerage Department water main work for 2025–2027. Together with the Henry Ford Health work, Gayanga entered 2025 with more than $40 million of contracted work on the books for the following three years.
Joint ventures and partnerships
Growing beyond demolition.
Demolition was the front door. By 2025 Gayanga was a heavy civil contractor — water main replacement, underground utilities, electrical duct banks, streetscapes, earthwork, and site development — often as the Detroit-based, Black-owned partner that let a larger firm meet the City's inclusion goals with a company that actually self-performed the work. The longest partnership was with Major Contracting (Major Cement when Gayanga first hauled for it in 2017). From 2020 on the two firms bid the City's streetscape program through City-certified joint ventures: McNichols (PW-7004, April 2020, more than 7,000 feet of curb), Conant (PW-7016), Grand River and Puritan (PW-7017), Rosa Parks (PW-7015), and in 2022 West Warren (PW-7013) and East Warren (PW-7034) — about $25 million of Department of Public Works work in all, with Gayanga's crews on the curb, sidewalk, and pavement removal and its trucks on the hauling. They went on to DPW sidewalk replacement, the DWSD Huber parking lot, and DWSD water main work, and in 2025 formed a standing company, Gayanga Major Joint Venture LLC, to pursue larger packages together.
The engineering
An estimating and engineering department of its own.
Most demolition contractors Gayanga's size bought their estimating from the outside. Gayanga built it in. LaCresha Turner — an African American civil engineer and Detroit Public Schools graduate with a quarter century in construction — joined after the first award as Vice President of Engineering & Estimating and built the department that took the company from house-by-house demolition bids to water main packages, streetscapes, and industrial site work. Her team priced every DWSD and DPW package, ran submittals and value engineering on the joint ventures, and trained a bench of engineering interns from the University of Michigan, Wayne State, and Michigan State, several of whom stayed on as Gayanga engineers. When Gayanga had under $1 million in awards, that department did not exist; by 2022 it was pricing $25 million of work a year.
The industrial work
DTE and Marathon.
The City's program was the foundation; the private and industrial work proved the company could operate anywhere. In 2019 Independence Excavating brought Gayanga on for DTE's Conners Creek Power Plant demolition — excavation, hauling, and disposal of 20,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil, backfill of the ash basin, and demolition of the Edison Boat Club, more than 3,500 crew hours on a live industrial site. It put a Black-owned Detroit contractor on a power plant demolition of that scale, doing the heavy work. Independence's project manager closed the job with a note: "A great project, with great team members. Looking forward to working with you on the next one." In 2022 Marathon Petroleum, after running the company through its safety and drug-testing prequalification, hired Gayanga directly for the Boynton neighborhood property program beside the Detroit refinery — abatement, demolition, and site restoration on Liebold, Patricia, and Bassett — and kept issuing work orders through 2025.
DWSD — with Major Contracting — 2025–2027
Streetscapes to water mains with Major Contracting
≈$43 million
After a series of DPW streetscape and road joint ventures, the partnership was awarded two DWSD water main replacement contracts, WS-744 and WS-745, covering Detroit neighborhoods through 2027. Gayanga was the joint-venture partner on both, with its own crews in the trench and responsibility for the trucking.
Henry Ford Health — Barton Malow / Turner — 2024–2025
Destination: Grand campus expansion
Minority partner
Selected as a minority partner on the multibillion-dollar Henry Ford Health expansion in New Center — utilities, excavation, and concrete work on one of the largest health-care builds in Michigan.
Bridging North America — 2019
Gordie Howe International Bridge
160+ acres
Site clearing, grubbing, grading, erosion control, sediment ponds, and berm construction for what became one of the largest ports of entry in North America.
04The Work
By the numbers.
Between 2017 and 2025 Gayanga demolished approximately 2,500 structures in Detroit and won more than $80 million in contracts across demolition, water services, underground utilities, streetscapes, site work, and joint ventures. Every City contract among them was won through a competitive bid.
≈2,500
Blighted structures demolished in Detroit, 2017–2025
Total revenue, 2017 through 2025 — more than 90 percent of it City of Detroit work
14
Jobs touched by every single demolition: 7 abatement workers, 3 demolition crew, 4 truck drivers
City of Detroit — April 2019
Historic Woodland Apartments, 31 Woodland St.
10 days
A century-old, five-story, 36,000-square-foot, 44-unit apartment building — long a neighborhood hazard — taken down with a high-reach excavator and union crews in 10 days on a contract that allowed 120, with the debris hauled by Gayanga's own trucks. Dust suppression and air monitoring ran throughout; the City's demolition appeals board later reviewed the job and cleared Gayanga.
City of Detroit — 2017–2025
Detroit Demolition Program
≈2,500 homes
Residential demolition, environmental abatement management, backfill, grading, and hauling across every district of the city — from the Hardest Hit Fund through Proposal N.
DTE Energy / Independence Excavating — 2019–2020
Conners Creek Power Plant
20,000 cubic yards
Subcontractor to Independence Excavating on the plant demolition: excavation, hauling, and Class II landfill disposal of 20,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil, ash-basin backfill, and demolition of the Edison Boat Club.
Marathon Petroleum — 2022–2025
Boynton neighborhood program
Prime contractor
Board-up, asbestos survey and abatement, demolition, and backfill of refinery-purchased homes in the Boynton neighborhood, performed directly for Marathon under its own safety program — nine job packages by 2025.
05The Jobs
Union careers for Detroiters who had been told the trades were not for them.
Before Gayanga, no demolition contractor in the City's program was hiring Detroiters from these neighborhoods at this scale — and at union scale. From its first payroll in 2017 to its last in 2025, Gayanga paid roughly $16 million in wages and, from 2018, about $4.5 million into the Laborers Local 1191 and Operating Engineers Local 324 pension, health, vacation, and training funds — on top of company healthcare and a retirement plan for the office. At its 2024 peak, 78 people were on payroll; roughly 85 percent lived in Detroit and 95 percent were Black or Hispanic.
We hired people who were unemployed, underemployed, or facing barriers to work — including returning citizens — and put them on a real ladder: pre-apprentice, apprentice, journeyman. Laborers went into Local 1191, operators into Local 324. Eighteen-year-old graduates started as Operating Engineer apprentices at $22 an hour plus benefits. And the office was Detroit talent too — engineers, estimators, and project managers like Ed Davis and Phillip Nwachokor, running multimillion-dollar work in a city where those seats had rarely been theirs.
Brian McKinney with Operating Engineers Local 324 and Laborers Local 1191 at the Historic Woodland demolition, 2019.
78
Union-scale employees on payroll at the 2024 peak
≈$16M
Wages paid to Detroiters by a union contractor, 2017 through 2025
≈$4.5M
Paid into Local 1191 and Local 324 pension, health, vacation, and training funds, 2018 through 2025
85%
Detroit residents; 95 percent Black or Hispanic
Where the benefit dollars went, 2018–2025
Every dollar of it went to a union fund for a Detroit worker.
≈$2.1M
Pension and retiree funds
≈$1.3M
Health and welfare
≈$840K
Vacation and holiday funds
≈$150K
Apprenticeship and training
≈$140K
Annuity, labor-management, and industry funds
01
Union scale — and above it
Signatory with Local 324 and Local 1191. Superintendents and foremen recruited from Adamo, Blaze, and Homrich were paid above trade scale.
02
Healthcare and retirement
Compensation was built around healthcare, one of the biggest gaps in low-income households. Field employees had union health and pension; office staff had company medical, dental, and vision, paid holidays, and a retirement plan with a company match from 2021. Gayanga recruited the way larger firms did — recruiters, signing bonuses, 90-day raises — and matched competing offers to keep the people it wanted.
03
Apprentice to journeyman
Paid training time, OSHA 30, asbestos supervisor licenses, CDLs, and NCCER credentials — then a union apprenticeship. Gayanga partnered with Local 324's Detroit Workforce of the Future program and the Turner School of Construction Management, and helped employees clear old records so they could move up.
Gayanga Co. has played a significant part in the revitalization of Detroit. Their team consists of 85% Detroiters and 95% minorities. This demolition company isn't just about getting the job done but being an asset to the community and being protective of the environment.City of Detroit Civil Rights, Inclusion & Opportunity Department, 2019
Otis, Operator — joined 2018
In comparison to other demolition companies, the work at Gayanga was not just about demolition. Employees had a chance to learn different parts of the construction industry and gain new skills through training.25-year operator who became a Local 324 union operator at Gayanga
Whitney, CDL Driver → Operating Engineer — joined 2019
A Southwestern High School graduate who had been driving over the road, away from her young son, to make a living. Driving for Gayanga in Detroit, she earned more, came home every night, and got her child back under her roof — and she went on to become a homeowner. She did not stop there. She learned every truck and every trailer in the yard, then every machine, went through the apprenticeship, and became a Local 324 heavy equipment operator.
Eric, CDL Driver
Eric earned his GED in prison and came home after more than a decade inside with no license and no work history that anyone would look at. Gayanga helped him earn his commercial driver's license, put him through on-the-job training, and put him behind the wheel of a company Peterbilt hauling for the City's demolition program — union wages, union benefits, and a reason to be home every night.
Workforce Development Program — final cohort
Twelve weeks of free training in asbestos abatement, truck driving, and demolition labor, ending in a Michigan Asbestos Abatement Contractor Supervisor license, OSHA 30, and NCCER credentials — and a full-time job offer for every graduate. Gayanga ran it with training partners including the Emerging Industries Training Institute, alongside Local 324's Detroit Workforce of the Future program.
100%
of students completed the program
91%
found new employment opportunities
88.9% → 14%
unemployment rate among graduates, before and after
06Built to Comply
We hired the City's own people to make sure we did it right.
A Black-owned contractor doing the most work in the program knew it would be watched more closely than anyone else. So Gayanga built a compliance operation that no other demolition contractor its size carried — and paid for it entirely out of City contract margins.
Gayanga went to the people who already knew the City's rules and paid them more to enforce those rules inside the company. Where the City required one project manager per contract, Gayanga assigned a full team — every one of them recruited from the City, the Land Bank, or the region's largest union demolition firms.
Eric Higgs — Chief Financial Officer. Recruited from the City of Detroit, where he served a decade as Deputy CFO and Chief Accounting Officer after the bankruptcy; a CPA trained at a national accounting firm. Hired in 2023 to align Gayanga's financial controls and reporting with the City's own standards.
Sara Hernandez — Compliance and Quality Control. Recruited in 2023 from the City of Detroit's demolition compliance department. Handled every invoice and compliance package and served as the final quality-control check between the field and the City.
Ericka Meah — Director of Field Operations. Recruited from the City of Detroit's General Services Department to run field operations across demolition, trucking, and backfill. She left Gayanga to become Chief Operating Officer of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department — a measure of the caliber of people it hired.
Shantelle Hardaway — Engineering Support. Recruited from the Detroit Land Bank Authority. Ran the property-tracking system that followed every job from wrecking permit to final grade.
John Maranian — Safety and Environmental Compliance Manager. A union safety professional recruited from Independence Excavating, previously with Homrich. From 2022 on he had free rein over safety and environmental compliance on every Gayanga site, backfill included.
Project managers and general superintendents. Degreed engineers and construction managers — senior project managers like Ed Davis, with degrees from programs including Morehouse and the University of Michigan — and general superintendents recruited from Barton Malow and Detroit Dismantling ran the work day to day.
Field staff. Recruited from Adamo, Blaze, and the region's other top union demolition firms. All union, all experienced, and paid top wages to ensure quality — because quality people, paid well, do the right thing.
Superintendents and foremen were paid above union scale. The finance, operations, and safety leads — including full-time safety professionals — were paid well into six figures, with the autonomy to do the job. That was not excessive. It was necessary, and it worked: from 2016 until the September 2025 suspension, every complaint raised against Gayanga was examined and found unsubstantiated. The most thorough test was the City of Detroit Office of Inspector General's own 2023 investigation — an allegation about one individual's handling of load tickets, not about the company. Gayanga turned over every ticket and every source approval, and the OIG interviewed the field and office staff one at a time, with no company leadership in the room. Every one described the same process, and on September 27, 2023, the OIG closed the case with no evidence to substantiate the allegations. That is what a real investigation looks like. Two years later, on the same subject, the same office did none of it before publishing.
BSEED open-hole inspection. No backfill could be scheduled until City inspectors approved that the excavation was clear of all debris and the sewer was capped.
City-approved sources only. Material came exclusively from sources approved by the City's environmental consultant, AKT Peerless, or from the public source list published by the City's Construction & Demolition Department. Many sources Gayanga proposed were not approved — and were not used.
A City field liaison who could show up at any time. City liaisons could arrive unannounced, stop the work, and approve or reject what they saw. After the 2023 investigation, Gayanga's sites were the most scrutinized in the program.
Documentation the City checked — and audited. Load tickets and photos for every delivery, reviewed against the City's own liaison inspections before any invoice went out. In January 2025 the Construction & Demolition Department audited Gayanga's backfill records, pulling sites at random "for completeness and consistency." Its one question was a truck number written as "19" on a form and "198" on the matching ticket.
Winter or final grade approval. BSEED inspected and approved the finished grade before the site was closed.
Voluntary switch to public sources. At the end of 2023, after the OIG inquiry cleared it, Gayanga voluntarily moved from a City-approved private source to the City's public sources and City-recommended brokered trucking — at an added cost of roughly $4,000 to $5,000 per property.
Tested three times. Never a finding of wrongdoing.
It was not the first time.
Every time someone came for Gayanga's name — a media personality, a former employee, an inspector general — the record was checked. And every time the record was checked, it held.
2019
The claim
A local media personality ran a series claiming Gayanga had released asbestos into a neighborhood at 31 Woodland.
The record
Dust suppression ran throughout; an environmental firm monitored the air. The state's review came down to a notification form — a box that should have been updated. On September 17, 2019, the City's demolition appeals board reviewed the data and cleared Gayanga.
2023
The claim
An allegation, later found unsubstantiated, about one individual's handling of backfill load tickets — a claim about a person, not the company.
The record
Gayanga produced every ticket and every source approval. The OIG interviewed the field and office staff one at a time. On September 27, 2023, it closed the case: no evidence to substantiate the allegations.
2025
The claim
The OIG announced that Gayanga had filled its sites with contaminated dirt from a Northland Mall redevelopment.
The record
The Mayor's own review found otherwise. "We reported to the Inspector General that the idea that in the first half of 2024 large amounts of dirt came from other locations did not appear to be true." — Mayor Mike Duggan, December 22, 2025. Watch the briefing.
07Everything Was Bid
There was no favoritism. There was a bid tab.
Much has been said about how Gayanga got its contracts. This is how it worked. Every demolition group in Detroit's program — Hardest Hit Fund, General Fund, Proposal N — was put out by the City's Office of Contracting and Procurement as a sealed, competitive bid. The lowest responsive bidder won. Gayanga bid on nearly all of them, lost far more than it won, and won its share. And under Detroit's charter, City Council does not select contractors. Awards were made by the Mayor's administration — procurement, the Construction & Demolition Department, and the departments Gayanga worked for — with Council voting only to approve the resulting contracts. The idea that a Council member could hand Gayanga a contract is not how the City works.
Lowest bidder won
The City's award terms were the same for everyone: if "the lowest bidder does not receive final contract approval, the City of Detroit reserves the right to award to the next lowest bidder." Prices, not relationships, decided the work.
1 of 4
June 2023: the City released Proposal N Groups Q7, Q8, Q9, and Q10 together. Gayanga bid all four and won one — Q10. The other three went to lower bidders.
3 of 18
Summer 2024: of eighteen emergency demolition bids the City opened, Gayanga won three. Other Detroit contractors won six, seven, and three.
City Council
Every contract above the threshold went to City Council in public session for approval, with the bid tabulation attached — roughly $59 million of Gayanga awards between 2019 and 2022 alone, according to the Free Press.
Why a Detroit company could win at all.
Detroit's ordinance gave certified Detroit-headquartered businesses a small bid equalization credit — a few percentage points — to offset the cost of hiring residents and paying union scale. Gayanga earned it by actually being headquartered in the city, employing Detroiters, and paying prevailing wages with benefits, all verified by the City.
Proposal N went further: a 30 percent set-aside — about $75 million — for Detroit small businesses and a 51 percent Detroit-resident hiring requirement. That was the program Gayanga competed in, alongside more than twenty other contractors, most of them Detroit-based.
And why we kept fighting for the ones who couldn't.
Gayanga did not only bid for itself. It pushed the City to enforce its own prequalification rules after firms with no employees won bids over qualified contractors. It hired workers who had been paid in cash by non-union firms and put them on union payroll. And it advocated, in writing and in public, for smaller Black contractors, bringing them on as subcontractors, truckers, and abatement crews when it won.
No contractor in the demolition program created more living-wage jobs for Black and brown residents in the city of Detroit.Gayanga statement, October 2025
The fight for the rules
Gayanga was leaned on because it kept asking the City to enforce its own rules.
2018
Pushing for Black contractors in the program — and paying for itAfter a Free Press investigation into who was getting demolition money, Gayanga's leadership publicly pushed the City and the Land Bank for more Black and minority contractors; the Free Press later reported that Detroit "saw a surge in minority demo contracts." The rules also changed in ways that cut Gayanga out of the regular Land Bank bid groups, and the company survived on emergency demolitions until the City's own demolition department took over the program.
SEPT 26, 2022
Formal Proposal N bid protest — for the workers, not the workGayanga filed a written protest with Chief Procurement Officer Sandra Stahl against two Proposal N awards to J. Keith Construction — Group M1/SA ($2,932,717) and Group M4 ($2,624,021) — because the firm had prequalified without demonstrating crews, equipment, or bonding, listing "employees" by photocopied driver's license and relying on cash-paid 1099 labor the program rules did not allow. The point was not to win those groups. It was that people working demolition sites for cash, with no payroll and no workers' compensation, were Black Detroiters who would be on their own the day one got hurt. The Chief Procurement Officer confirmed the department was investigating, and the protest was upheld.
JAN – FEB 2023
Making the bid tabs public againWhen Proposal N award letters for Groups O1 through O5 went out without the bid tabulations that every public bid is supposed to disclose, Gayanga wrote to procurement on behalf of all bidders and would not let it drop. The Chief Procurement Officer acknowledged that parts of the award-notification process had not been carried over properly and restored the tabs.
MAR 2023
Protesting for the contractors who feared retributionGayanga protested the Proposal N P2 and P3 awards and an emergency demolition award to a firm using "cash day laborers" to prequalify, and gave the City's CFO and procurement office a database showing which firms had won groups without the workforce to perform them. Other contractors agreed but were afraid to sign their names. Gayanga signed its name every time.
08The Moments
We were the company that cleaned up your neighborhood.
Giving back was not a program. It was the point.
1,000 meals
FEED Detroit
With the City's Parks & Recreation Department and FEED Detroit, we served Thanksgiving meals at four recreation centers across the city — Adams Butzel, Farwell, Kemeny, and Joseph Walker Williams — and packed and delivered more the next day.
In the room
Meeting Detroiters where they were
At Randolph Career and Technical Center, Brian McKinney talked with Detroiters getting into the trades about what a union demolition career looked like and how to get one. It was a constant: career fairs, high schools, recreation centers, the CDL class at Wayne County Community College's Eastern Campus, hiring days at the Northwest Activities Center — 1,500 incoming freshmen from 22 Detroit high schools at the Find Your Future fair, 750 more at United Way's Summer Career Connections Fair. Gayanga showed up, told people the jobs existed, and made sure the people telling them looked like them. When Brian saw women in that CDL class, he told them one of Gayanga's best drivers was a woman — and brought Whitney in to tell them herself.
Side by side
When the City needed us, we were there
For years the relationship ran both ways. When the City needed a contractor at a community meeting, a neighborhood outreach event, a press conference, or a career fair, Gayanga went. And when Gayanga celebrated, the City came: at the company's fifth-anniversary dinner the guests included Conrad Mallett, then the City of Detroit's Deputy Mayor and now its Corporation Counsel, who joined the toast. Gayanga had reached the point where the City did not just award it work — it showed up for it.
09The Legacy
Why it was built — and what it left behind.
"The majority of the federal funds to demolish structures in highly impacted African-American community strongholds went to large suburban white companies that didn't hire anyone who looked like the people in the community." That was the founding problem, as Gayanga's CEO described it to DBusiness in 2020. Pull up to almost any construction site in Detroit and you did not see Black Detroiters running the machines. Gayanga was built to change who was in the cab, who was in the office, and who was in the room.
The iron
New machines, run by Detroiters.
Gayanga started with no equipment of its own, renting from Michigan CAT. Within its first year it bought new — a CAT 336, two 323s, and a D4 dozer, about $2 million of iron financed on a company that had done 32 houses. By 2025 the fleet was more than $4 million: Peterbilt 567 tractors, lowboys and dump trains, CAT excavators, dozers, and loaders, ten semi-trucks and fourteen trailers. Every one was run by a union operator or CDL driver, nearly all Detroiters, and kept running by Gayanga's own mechanics in an in-house shop, because an idle machine was an idle crew. "No longer do African American residents in urban communities only see themselves holding signs or flags on heavy infrastructure projects. They see themselves controlling the heavy equipment, creating the estimates, managing the projects." — Brian McKinney
The room
The only African American on the NDA board.
Gayanga joined the National Demolition Association early, because it knew what it did not know, and the NDA was where the best demolition contractors in the country shared how they did it: technical knowledge from firms many times its size, safety and estimating practice, and a view of the industrial, utility, and heavy civil sectors Gayanga would grow into. In March 2023 Brian McKinney was elected to the NDA Board of Directors — the only African American at the table — and treated the seat as a voice for bringing more contractors who looked like Gayanga's crews into the industry. He sat on the Education Committee and the Career Path working group. Gayanga was featured on the NDA's Demolition NOW podcast in 2019, taught at the national conventions in 2024 and 2025 (the Superintendent Boot Camp, the equipment maintenance course, and the "What's Keeping You Up at Night?" panel), and was invited back to co-facilitate the 2026 Boot Camp. The company was a national-level supporter of the National Society of Black Engineers, and its interns served as NSBE chapter officers.
The pipeline
Interns, scholarships, and a pipeline.
Every summer Gayanga brought in engineering, finance, and operations interns — from the University of Michigan, Wayne State, Michigan State, UM-Dearborn, Indiana's Kelley School, and Bowling Green — and turned interns into employees. It started in 2019 with Alexis Edge, a Detroit native, Michigan State environmental engineering student, and NSBE member who could not get an internship anywhere until Gayanga gave her one. Under LaCresha Turner she rebuilt the company's load-ticket and demolition-packet tracking, built its first bid-estimating sheet, and added environmental-impact views to its materials data — the beginnings of the documentation system that later passed every audit. Gayanga named her Summer Intern of the Year, brought her back in 2020, and offered her a full-time engineering position on graduation; she went on to PepsiCo. Shelbi Hogan, a Wayne State civil engineering honors student with a 4.0, interned in 2022 and stayed on as a Gayanga engineer; Terrence Bartell interned the same summer while an officer of Michigan's NSBE chapter. Both won National Demolition Association scholarships at the 2023 convention in Phoenix — Shelbi the Southern California Chapter Scholarship, Terrence the Mike and Nancy Taylor Scholarship. Kameron Bowman, of Indiana's Kelley School, won the NDA's $4,000 David P. Sinclair International Scholarship with Gayanga as his sponsor. Gayanga also sponsored Local 324's Detroit Workforce of the Future program and ran a pre-apprentice cohort of 50 — proof, as one Council member put it, that "there is no reason for anybody to say they can't find qualified Detroiters."
Seats at the table
Beyond the NDA board, Gayanga's leadership served on the City's Board of Wrecking Examiners and the board of the Metro Detroit Black Business Alliance, and co-founded JOURNi, a Detroit technology-education nonprofit. When Gayanga closed, it did not simply send people home. Its leadership worked its partnerships — Major Contracting, Independence Excavating, and others — to place its people, and the Black operators, drivers, laborers, engineers, and managers Gayanga trained are working today at companies across the region, still feeding their families. That was the point. Gayanga was a signatory contractor with Operating Engineers Local 324 and Laborers Local 1191, a member of the Detroit Regional Chamber, and active in the National Association of Minority Contractors.
10Recognition
What was written about us — before September 2025.
For nearly a decade, the public record on Gayanga was a record of a company doing what it said it would do. It is still there for anyone who looks.
2019
Detroit Free Press — Mayor Duggan on the Land Bank program"We have an outstanding company, Gayanga. It was a contractor who … grew successfully."
2018
Detroit Free Press — "Detroit sees surge in minority demo contracts after Freep investigation"October 31, 2018. After the Free Press exposed how little of Detroit's demolition money reached minority contractors, Gayanga was among the Detroit-based, Black-owned firms whose push changed the numbers.
2019
Black Enterprise — BE Modern Man"Meet the Techie: Brian McKinney Sr.," recognized for technology and community economic development work.
2020
DBusiness — 30 in Their Thirties"Gayanga Co. has razed close to 1,000 structures in Detroit. The business has grown from a $400,000 startup to a thriving contender."
2020
City of Detroit — first Proposal N awardsMayor Duggan: "These contracts show that there is the talent right here in Detroit to rebuild Detroit." Gayanga: "When we get a contract, the community gets a contract."
2022
Construction Digest — the Detroit Demolition Department"The contractor began taking down homes in 2017 with a $500,000 contract … Last year, the company received $17 million in work from the city of Detroit."
2019
Crain's Detroit Business — 40 Under 40Brian McKinney, recognized for returning to his hometown and building Gayanga Co.
2019
Crain's — "10 Black entrepreneurs on the rise in Detroit""McKinney prides himself in hiring Detroiters, with 84 percent of his 45-employee workforce residing in the city."
2019
National Demolition Association — Demolition NOW podcastGayanga's role in the community and the future of workforce development in the industry.
2021
CONEXPO-CON/AGG — "Unconventional Recruiting Helps Detroit Demolition Company Flourish"A national industry profile of Gayanga's pre-apprenticeship pathway and Detroit-first hiring.
2022
Michigan Chronicle — Women of ExcellenceLaCresha Turner, VP of Estimating & Engineering, a 25-year construction veteran.
2022
Crain's — Notable Women in Construction, Design & ArchitectureLaCresha Ware, who joined when Gayanga had under $1 million in awards and grew it to a 30-plus staff and $25 million of work.
2022
Michigan Chronicle — Men of ExcellenceBrian McKinney, honored as a champion of economic empowerment and diversity.
2022
BridgeDetroit — Proposal N analysisGayanga awarded the most Proposal N contract dollars of any firm in the voter-approved program.
2024
Crain's — Notable Black Business LeadersBrian McKinney.
2024
EY Entrepreneur Of The Year — Michigan & Northwest Ohio finalistBrian McKinney, Gayanga Co.
2024
Detroit Regional Chamber — "Opportunity Rising"Featured in the Chamber's video series and honored among its member leaders named to Crain's Notable Black Business Leaders.
2025
EY Entrepreneur Of The Year — Michigan & Northwest Ohio finalist, second consecutive yearNamed May 2, 2025 — four months before the suspension.
11The Record
What happened in 2025 — and what the record shows.
On September 11, 2025, the City of Detroit Office of Inspector General (the City's own OIG — not a state or federal office) publicly suspended Gayanga Co. and its founder over backfill dirt at demolition sites, without first contacting the supplier it accused us of misrepresenting. The suspension expired on March 11, 2026, at the 180-day limit set by City ordinance, with no findings against the company. By then the City had canceled every one of Gayanga's contracts, and a company built over a decade was gone. The facts below are drawn from public statements, public meetings, and the complaint Gayanga filed in Wayne County Circuit Court.
September 2023
Cleared once already.
A prior inquiry into Gayanga's backfill by the City's OIG, under Detroit Inspector General Ellen Ha, was not substantiated. Gayanga was cleared and, on its own initiative, moved all backfill to the City's public sources.
January – June 2024
The City accelerated the work and changed the dirt.
The City raised Gayanga's required pace from 10–12 to 16–18 demolitions a week — and the pressure came from the top: on July 24, 2024, the Mayor's office wrote that "Mayor Duggan has asked to meet with you" that week "to discuss demolition production of his current contracts," and the meeting was held in the Mayor's office the following Tuesday. Gayanga had a City-owned, City-approved source of its own at Far West / Rouge Park. It chose to move off it anyway, to the City's public source list and City-recommended suppliers, because after the 2023 investigation it was under constant scrutiny and believed the public list would give it more protection. It bought material where the City told every contractor to buy it. Every load was documented, and the City's own liaisons inspected the sites.
January 2025
The City audits Gayanga's backfill records.
The Construction & Demolition Department pulled Gayanga sites at random and audited the load tickets and compliance forms "for completeness and consistency." Its one question was a truck number typed as "19" instead of "198." Eight months later the same department's testing would be the basis for a public suspension.
March – July 2025
Iron Horse.
Following the City's public source list, Gayanga used Iron Horse of Michigan — approved by the City in 2023 through AKT Peerless and a native pit of the kind the Mayor called "the gold standard for backfill" — at dozens of properties. Three other contractors — SC Environmental, Adamo, and Salenbien — used the same source at hundreds more.
September 11, 2025
Interim suspension, announced to the press.
The OIG suspended Gayanga and Brian McKinney, alleging the dirt came from a Northland Mall redevelopment and that "33 of 41" tested sites failed, and referred the matter to the Detroit Police Department. Before publishing it had contacted one supplier — Ashley Land Development, which confirmed Gayanga's loads. It had not contacted Iron Horse, the source it accused Gayanga of misrepresenting; Major Contracting, which hauled most of Gayanga's material; or any carrier. It had not interviewed Gayanga. To this day the OIG has never told Gayanga who made the 2025 allegations or what they were based on.
November 3, 2025
The City suspends Iron Horse.
After Gayanga named its supplier publicly, the City tested other sites, found the same contamination, and suspended Iron Horse as a program supplier.
November 18, 2025
City Council upholds the suspension, 9–0.
The City's Inspector General told Council that Gayanga had "filled roughly 2,400 residential sites across the city." Gayanga's field work stopped. Payroll for dozens of Detroiters stopped with it.
December 22, 2025
The Mayor's Final Blight Removal Report confirms what the OIG left out.
In his last week in office, Mayor Mike Duggan disclosed that the OIG's original tip — that Gayanga had filled "all of their holes" with Northland Mall material in early 2024 — had been checked against the supplier's records, and that Ashley confirmed 309 of the 323 sites. "The report was inaccurate," the Mayor said. He also disclosed that Iron Horse had supplied four contractors at 424 sites, only 87 of them Gayanga's, and that the City had "no evidence to believe that the contractors knew."
March 11, 2026
The suspension expires. No findings.
After 90 days and three 30-day extensions, the suspension lapsed at the 180-day limit in the City's debarment ordinance. No investigation — by the OIG, the Detroit Police Department, or anyone else — has resulted in a finding of wrongdoing by Brian McKinney or anyone at Gayanga Co. But the City had canceled roughly $34 million of Gayanga's Proposal N contracts and cut off its share of the $43 million DWSD joint venture. There was nothing left to return to.
May 7, 2026
Gayanga closes — and files suit.
Gayanga Co. announced it had closed its doors and filed a defamation lawsuit against the City of Detroit Office of Inspector General in Wayne County Circuit Court (Case No. 26-007722-CZ), seeking $100 million, so the full record could be examined in open court.
May – August 2026
The City moves to dismiss on immunity grounds.
The City's response to the lawsuit was a motion to dismiss on governmental immunity — an argument that the City's Inspector General cannot be sued for what it said, not an argument that what it said was true. Gayanga filed its opposition on August 7, 2026. The motion is pending.
There was no motive
Gayanga had clean, City-approved dirt for free. It spent its own money trying to find more.
The theory behind the suspension is that Gayanga bought cheap contaminated fill to save money. The record shows the opposite. Through its joint-venture partner's DWSD project at Far West Detroit / Rouge Park, 21800 West Warren — a City-owned site whose material was reviewed by AKT Peerless and, after an initial denial, approved as a public source on resubmission by the City's Group Executive for Construction and Demolition — Gayanga had clean, City-approved backfill at no cost, trucked to its sites at no cost. Free dirt, freely delivered. There was no financial reason to put anything else in a hole.
As the City's pace climbed, Gayanga went looking for more clean dirt the hard way. From November 2024 to April 2025 it paid for independent retesting of Waste Management's Woodland Meadows site — some 900,000 tons of native soil from a former golf course — through four laboratories and consultants, to get it approved as a new public source for the whole program. The City's consultant declined it in April 2025. A contractor trying to sneak bad dirt into Detroit does not spend six months and its own money trying to get good dirt approved.
What the OIG told the public — September 11, 2025
It is alleged Gayanga used contaminated dirt from a Northland Mall redevelopment in Southfield, Michigan to backfill residential properties in the City of Detroit.
Test results showed that the dirt located at 33 of the 41 (over 80%) properties tested thus far failed to meet the state's residential standards.
The expiration of the interim suspension is strictly the result of time limits imposed by the Debarment Ordinance and should not be interpreted as a finding or indication that Gayanga Co., LLC or Mr. McKinney has been cleared of wrongdoing.
City of Detroit Office of Inspector General: "Statement on the Interim Suspension of Gayanga, Co. LLC and Brian McKinney," September 11, 2025, and its follow-up statement of March 19, 2026 — issued after the suspension expired, three months after the Mayor's press conference, and still citing the same "33 of 41."
What the Mayor told the public — Final Blight Removal Report, December 22, 2025
The first report we got was from the Office of the Inspector General, who said that they had a tip that in the first six months of 2024, Gayanga wasn't actually using approved sources. They were filling all of their holes with contamination from the Northland Mall. Now the tickets showed that the dirt came from Ashley, a native sand and gravel pit … We went out to Ashley and said to Ashley, did they get the dirt from you? And Ashley said in 309 of the 323 cases, they did get the dirt from us. And so, the report was inaccurate.
We reported to the Inspector General that the idea that in the first half of 2024 large amounts of dirt came from other locations did not appear to be true.
Mayor Mike Duggan, delivering the City's Final Blight Removal Report at his last press briefing before leaving office, December 22, 2025. Watch the briefing on the City of Detroit's YouTube channel — the Gayanga remarks begin at about 16:50.
"We reported to the Inspector General that the idea that in the first half of 2024 large amounts of dirt came from other locations did not appear to be true."
Mayor Mike Duggan — December 22, 2025 — three months after the OIG suspended Gayanga on exactly that idea · Watch it
What an investigation looks like
The basics of any inquiry — and what happened here.
None of this is exotic. It is what the same office did in 2023, and what Gayanga's complaint and its response to the City's immunity motion lay out step by step.
An investigator normally
The City of Detroit Inspector General, 2025
Interviews the accused before accusing them.
Never interviewed Gayanga's leadership or the crews who ran the backfill before publishing. Its own office had done exactly that in 2023.
Verifies the tip against the sources named on the records.
Checked one source — Ashley, which confirmed 309 of 323 — then stopped. Never called Iron Horse, the joint-venture partner that hauled most of the material, or a single carrier.
Tests the allegation against the documentation on file.
Published before checking the tip against the load tickets or the City's own liaison inspections, and later described the program as "self reporting … no independent source."
Counts everything it knows.
Announced 41 sites. Left out the 323 the City had already checked — and put four of those already-checked sites on the "failed" list.
Corrects the record when the facts change.
After the Mayor said on December 22, 2025 that the theory "did not appear to be true," the OIG repeated "33 of 41 (over 80%)" on March 19, 2026, without updating a number.
Finishes within the time the law allows, or says why it could not.
Let the 180-day suspension run out with no findings, then said the expiration should not be read as clearing anyone.
Treats everyone in the same position the same way.
Four contractors used the same City-approved source with the same results. One was named, suspended, and stripped of its contracts.
Refers to the police after it investigates — not instead of investigating.
The suspension came September 11. By the Mayor's account the police were brought in September 17, and the OIG's own investigation was still "ongoing" six months later.
The 33
Look at the list the OIG called an 80 percent failure.
The OIG's "33 of 41" was the whole public case. The list of those 33 properties is attached to Gayanga's complaint, and it breaks down like this.
15
were backfilled between March and July 2025 with Iron Horse material — the City-approved "gold standard" source that three other contractors were using at hundreds of sites, and that the City itself later suspended.
13
were on Tacoma Street, backfilled in 2022 and 2023, mostly from Far West Detroit — a City-owned site the City's own consultant had approved — with trucking shared among several haulers.
4
were backfilled between January and June 2024 from the Ashley pit — the exact period the City had already checked with the supplier, found 309 of 323 loads confirmed, and reported to the OIG "did not appear to be true." They are on the OIG's own list: 3946 Lemay (backfilled January 5, 2024), 3526 Beatrice (February 12, 2024), 4563 Belvidere (April 4, 2024), and 6760 Brimson (June 4, 2024).
1
was backfilled in 2018, six years before the tip, under a different program and a different set of rules.
The real percentage
What "over 80 percent" becomes when you count everything the City had already checked.
80%+
What the OIG announced: 33 of 41 sites "failed."
≈9%
The same 33 sites measured against everything that had actually been checked: the OIG's 41 plus the 323 first-half-2024 sites the City had already verified with the supplier — 360 sites, with the four that appear on both lists counted once. 33 of 360.
The arithmetic, using only the City's numbers: before the suspension the City checked 323 first-half-2024 sites with the supplier — 309 confirmed, and of the 14 that were not, 12 tested elevated and 2 did not, so 311 clean. The OIG had that information, announced the 41, and left out the 323. Put the two lists together, counting the four properties on both only once, and 360 sites had been checked. The OIG's 33 against 360 is about 9 percent, not 80. Even adding the eight other sites the City itself said tested elevated, it is 41 of 360 — about 11 percent. Either way, roughly nine of ten sites were clean. That does not justify a public suspension, and it is nothing like the number the public was given.
Why did the announcement leave out the 309 sites the City had already confirmed?
Gayanga's answer, in its complaint, is that the OIG was looking for a contractor to blame, not for the truth. It never interviewed Gayanga's leadership or the crews who ran the backfill. It never called the supplier it accused Gayanga of misrepresenting. It relied, by its own later statement, on the City's Construction & Demolition Department to do the testing — the same department that approved every source. It referred the matter to the police only after making the accusation: by the Mayor's own account, on September 17, six days after the suspension and after Gayanga had been cleared on the first-half-2024 allegation. None of the other three contractors using the same source had their staff questioned, their tickets pulled, or their contracts touched.
In Gayanga's view, that is the tie that holds the whole thing together. Every source in question — Far West Detroit, Ashley, Iron Horse — was approved by the City's Construction & Demolition Department and its consultant. That department set the pace, ran the liaisons who inspected the sites, published the source list, and then conducted the testing the OIG relied on. A finding that the approved sources were bad is a finding about the department that approved them. A finding that one contractor cheated is not. Gayanga believes the second story was told because the first one could not be. And in Gayanga's experience it was not new: the official who as a deputy director of the Building Authority oversaw the 2018 rule changes that pushed Gayanga out of the regular bid groups went on to run the department that approved these sources — a consistent theme across seven years.
Fair questions for the Construction & Demolition Department and its director, Tim Palazzolo
Why has the department never been asked to answer for the sources it approved?
Or for the pace it set — and the meeting the Mayor called to push it?
Or for the field liaisons it ran, who inspected Gayanga's sites constantly?
Or for the audit it passed Gayanga on in January 2025?
Or for the testing it then conducted for the City's Inspector General on its own approved sources?
Why did it pay a contractor whose own sites had failed to redo its own work — four times that Gayanga knows of? The department paid SC Environmental once to demolish and fill 3314 Edsel, 1230 Patricia, 8392 Gartner, and 8087 Vanderbilt, then paid it again to dig the fill back out. That is paying twice for the same hole. Who decided that, and who approved it?
How many more times did that happen? Four is the number that surfaced in the public record. The department has told Council it has more than 500 sites to remediate. How many of those remediation purchase orders went to the contractor that put the material in the ground, and how many went to contractors that were also using Iron Horse, on the same list, in the same months?
What did the City recover, and from whom? In May 2026 a Law Department attorney, Graham Anderson, told Council that cost recovery "is being pursued" — against Gayanga, for total damages, as BridgeDetroit reported. Gayanga's sites are 87 of the 424. Is the City pursuing SC Environmental, Adamo, and Salenbien for the other 337 — or is it paying them?
How did it fence off and remediate the wrong house — 8982 McClellan instead of 8990 McClellan — paying $27,280.64 for a property that never needed it, on a form its own director requested, while the contaminated house next door "will need to be rebid"?
Why did it approve Iron Horse — a supplier whose owner had pleaded guilty in the Kilpatrick-era federal corruption case to rigging a City bid — as the program's "gold standard," and never explain it?
And why, in May 2026, after one contractor had been destroyed, did it quietly rebuild the whole system — cutting its approved sources from fourteen to seven and testing every source itself, monthly, at the pit?
That reform is an admission of what was wrong before. Gayanga is asking who was responsible for it.
Gayanga does not say this with bitterness. It says it because the public record says it, and because the people who lost their jobs deserve to know why.
The Iron Horse record
One City-approved source. Four contractors. One publicly named.
Iron Horse of Michigan's pit on Childs Lake Road in Milford was approved as a public backfill source by the City's environmental consultant, AKT Peerless, on August 3, 2023, and was on the source list the Construction & Demolition Department circulated to every demolition contractor in 2024. The Mayor himself called a native pit like Iron Horse "the gold standard for backfill." What the City did not say is that Iron Horse's owner, Rodney Burrell, had pleaded guilty in 2010, in the federal corruption case that ended the Kilpatrick administration, to submitting an inflated bid to help a Kilpatrick associate win a City contract — a fact BridgeDetroit reported after the suspension. Gayanga used it, on the City's list, at dozens of properties between March and July 2025 — 87 by the City's own count. So did SC Environmental, Adamo, and Salenbien, at hundreds more.
424
Detroit demolition sites the City says received Iron Horse material — four contractors, from mid-2024 to late 2025
87
of those 424 the City tied to Gayanga; the other 337 belonged to SC Environmental, Adamo, and Salenbien — contractors the City never named
32%
of the first 50 Iron Horse sites tested — across all contractors — failed. In the Mayor's words: "All of our contractors have exactly the same outcome."
1
contractor publicly named and stripped of every contract: Gayanga. SC Environmental, Adamo, and Salenbien, which received material from the same source, were never publicly named and kept their contracts.
"The Gayanga dirty-dirt property" was not Gayanga's.
Press play: the March 9, 2026 exchange at City Council's Public Health & Safety Committee (56 seconds). The full meeting is on the City's eScribe site, at about 1:07:00. Download the clip
On March 9, 2026, a City Construction & Demolition official told Council members that a contaminated site at 5558 Ivanhoe was "the Gayanga dirty-dirt property." The State of Michigan's public demolition data lists SC Environmental as the contractor — and the City had already paid $37,298.40 to remediate it. In June 2026 the Free Press reported the program's highest cleanup bill yet, nearly $93,000 at 4551 25th Street. That site, too, was SC Environmental's.
Gayanga used the same City-approved sources the Construction & Demolition Department put on its public list, yet we alone were accused of sourcing fill from somewhere we didn't — and it was only after we identified our supplier and handed over the records that the City tested other sites and found the same elevated contamination elsewhere, including one cleanup now costing roughly $92,880. Had the City's Inspector General investigated before making public accusations against Gayanga, this source would have been stopped sooner and far fewer holes would have been filled with dirt that could have been contaminated.Gayanga Co. statement to the Detroit Free Press, June 25, 2026
Paid to fix their own work.
While the City's Law Department told Council in May 2026 that cost recovery "is being pursued" — against Gayanga — the City was hiring the contractor whose sites had failed to do the cleanup. At 3314 Edsel it paid SC Environmental $19,382 to demolish the house and fill the hole, then $32,795.16 to dig its own backfill out again. It did the same at Patricia, Gartner, and Vanderbilt. Then, as Gayanga's complaint states, SC Environmental "later performed the majority of backfill replacement work on Gayanga's sites using the same Iron Horse sourced materials."
By July 2026 the City had excavated more than 100 sites at an average of roughly $34,000 to $36,000 each, with 450 more to go and a total cost estimate approaching $27 million — more than triple the $8 million the Mayor forecast in December. Gayanga, suspended and stripped of its contracts, was the one contractor not working.
NOV 18
Contracts canceled — for one companyAt the Council hearing, Gayanga's counsel noted that the Law Department — now led by the same official who, as Deputy Mayor, had toasted the company at its fifth-anniversary celebration — had moved to cancel all of Gayanga's City contracts, while "other similar companies, although they were suspended, their contracts were not terminated." A Council member asked: "Why is that happening to this company … not to other companies who have been investigated for a similar complaint?"
HONOR SYSTEM
The OIG's own description of the program"It's self reporting … The tickets that are required to go in that says where dirt came from, comes from the vendor. There's no independent source of that." — City of Detroit Inspector General, November 18, 2025. Gayanga's tickets, photos, and City liaison inspections were the independent record the program lacked.
The SC Environmental record
Nine addresses, one contractor, $377,869.67 — and the wrong house.
Addresses, purchase orders, and amounts, so anyone can check them against the City's procurement records and the State's public EGLE notifications.
Address
Demolished and backfilled by
City paid to remediate
Paid to
City PO
3314 Edsel
SC Environmental
$32,795.16
SC Environmental — to replace its own backfill
3093665 (bid 186735)
1230 Patricia
SC Environmental
$32,286.76
SC Environmental — to replace its own backfill
3094572
8392 Gartner
SC Environmental
$33,203.35
SC Environmental — to replace its own backfill
3095392
8087 Vanderbilt
SC Environmental
$44,756.40
SC Environmental — to replace its own backfill
3093487
5558 Ivanhoe
SC Environmental
$37,298.40
Another contractor
3091332
1330 Wheelock
SC Environmental
$36,514.80
Another contractor
3090851
6096 Chopin
SC Environmental
$31,204.80
Another contractor
3090726
11736 Mendota
SC Environmental
$36,930.00
Another contractor
3090720
4551 25th Street
SC Environmental
$92,880.00 — the most expensive cleanup in the program
Another contractor
3093166
8982 McClellan
— (the wrong address; the contaminated property was 8990 McClellan)
$27,280.64
SC Environmental — for a property that never needed the work
—
Every address in the first nine rows was SC Environmental's, not Gayanga's — each confirmed in the State's public EGLE records. Four highlighted rows are the City paying SC Environmental $143,041.67 to redo its own work; five more are other contractors paid $234,828 to fix SC's sites — $377,869.67 for one contractor never publicly named. The last row is the City's admitted mistake: its field team "incorrectly marked off/fenced off the wrong address," SC Environmental was paid $27,280.64 to dig out and refill 8982 McClellan, and the contaminated house next door, 8990 McClellan, "will need to be rebid." The requestor of record was the Construction & Demolition Department's director.
You be the judge
The same rules, applied to everyone else.
Gayanga has never asked for special treatment. It has asked for the treatment the City gave everyone else in the same program. Here is how that treatment compared.
When employees of another contractor were actually charged
In 2019 two former employees of the Adamo Group — one of the largest demolition contractors in the program — pleaded guilty in federal court to bribery and bid-rigging in Detroit's demolition program, including sharing another contractor's price sheets. The company said it had not known. It was not suspended. Its contracts were not canceled. No public OIG investigation of the company followed, and it was still working in the program, using the same Iron Horse source, in 2025.
Gayanga: no employee charged, no finding of wrongdoing, company and founder suspended by name, every contract canceled.
When another contractor was suspended
In June 2022 the OIG suspended Inner City Contracting, a Detroit-based demolition contractor with nearly $10 million in program contracts. In September 2022 the OIG rescinded the suspension and declared the company "eligible to resume all work." Its contracts had waited for it.
In November 2025 the OIG told City Council that an interim suspension means "all contracts are canceled … you can't" work. That is what happened to Gayanga. It is not what had happened to Inner City Contracting three years earlier.
When the City said it would go after the contractors responsible
The Mayor promised the City would "go after" those responsible for the cost. Instead it paid SC Environmental $143,041.67 to replace its own backfill at Edsel, Patricia, Gartner, and Vanderbilt, $27,280.64 more to remediate the wrong address (8982 McClellan, when the contaminated property was 8990), and then hired it to do the bulk of the backfill replacement on Gayanga's sites. Adamo and Salenbien kept working. So did Gayanga's joint-venture partner, which hauled most of Gayanga's material — never questioned, never named, never lost a contract.
Gayanga, whose sites received the same material from the same City-approved source, was the only one of the four not working — and the only one named.
When and how it was announced
The suspension was announced to the press on September 11, 2025 — eight weeks before Detroit's mayoral election, with the founder's name in the headline and, to Gayanga's knowledge, before anyone from the company had been asked a question. If the OIG believed individuals had done something wrong, it never told the company who, or what. It suspended the company.
Gayanga believes the timing and the target were not accidents. Readers can draw their own conclusions from the record above.
87 of 424
By the City's own count, Iron Horse material went to 424 demolition sites across four contractors. Eighty-seven were Gayanga's. The OIG led with "33 of 41" and never corrected it, never mentioned the 309 of 323 sites its own tip got wrong, and never named the other three contractors — SC Environmental, Adamo, and Salenbien — who kept working, and were then paid to clean up. The questions Gayanga has asked the court to answer are simple ones: why the selective narrative, and who it was meant to protect.
12Our Statement
Proud of what we stood for. Proud of what we built.
Gayanga was built with a purpose — to create real opportunity for Black Detroiters in an industry where access has historically been limited. For nearly a decade we opened doors, built careers, and proved that a Black-owned firm can compete and lead at the highest level. We bid for our work, competed fairly, and advocated for smaller Black contractors. When Gayanga closed, no one stepped in to fill the void. The union-scale jobs for Detroiters from these neighborhoods did not move to another company. They simply went away.
What happened over the past year does not just impact me or this company. It sends a chilling message to the next generation of Black contractors and workers trying to break into this industry, and it left the smaller contractors, truckers, and partners who depended on this work dealing with the fallout. That is why we filed suit: so the truth can be told — not just for Gayanga, but for every small, community-based business striving for a fair shot in Detroit.
This is bigger than Gayanga. It is about what kind of environment we are creating for Black entrepreneurs and skilled workers in Detroit, and whether opportunity in this industry will truly remain open.
While this chapter closed painfully, we remain proud of what Gayanga stood for, proud of the opportunities we created, and confident the truth will finally be told.
Brian McKinney Sr.Founder & CEO, Gayanga Co. — Detroit
