A.G. Gancarski
The slogan d’jour: One City, One Jacksonville. But the city’s boards and commissions are largely white and male. And it will take time and work to change that imbalance.
Of 332 people currently serving, 65 percent are male — a number not substantially different between City Council appointees (64 percent male) and appointees from other parties, such as the Mayor (66 percent).
70 percent of all appointees: Caucasian. The percentage of Council appointees is even higher: 80 percent, per the most recent Boards and Commissions diversity report.
This ratio holds true, more or less, no matter who is in office.
And some would contend that needs to change.
On Wednesday morning, Council President Anna Brosche convened a public notice meeting “to increase awareness of opportunities to serve in hopes of broadening the pool of candidates that apply.”
Members of boards and commissions attended, along with former Council President Lori Boyer, and representatives from the Mayor’s Office.
Brosche’s goal with the meeting: to broaden the exposure of openings and make the “pool of applicants for consideration larger than one.”
Boards and commissions have codified requirements, including residency and experience requirements, which can make filling these positions even more challenging.
Councilwoman Boyer noted some techniques she used to get recommendations, including reaching out to industry groups.
Feedback was sparse, and recommendations lacked diversity components as well as elemental competence in many cases, Boyer said.
“It’s both subject-matter expertise trade organizations that need to engage, and groups in the community [including] people of various ethnic backgrounds and trying to get women involved,” Boyer said.
Boyer noted the difficulty of filling certain diversity components required her to “cold-call them,” which she described as a “ridiculous” amount of time.
“A challenge is how to reach the right group,” Boyer said, especially relative to specialist positions like architects and arborists.
“When you get so constrained, it’s like you have to have a purple person living in these four blocks, it’s hard to find them,” Boyer said.
One meeting attendee noted that she promoted a board opening on her Facebook page to women, and they were surprised that such things were open to the public.
“There’s just a barrier to access,” she said.
There are dozens of open positions on boards and commissions, with elapsed terms presenting even more.
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Brosche’s position on boards and commissions is an augury of some strong moves toward social justice from Brosche and from council leadership.
Monday saw Brosche take control of the news cycle when she declared that Jacksonville needs to find an endgame for its increasingly divisive Confederate monuments.
Brosche intends to “propose legislation to move Confederate monuments, memorials, and markers from public property to museums and educational institutions where they can be respectfully preserved and historically contextualized.”
In the wake of that proposal, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office reports “chatter” from white-pride/domestic terrorist types, and there is nothing approaching consensus in City Hall regarding the monument movement.
More broadly, the Jacksonville City Council likewise is prioritizing diversity in this month’s budget hearings, with departmental hiring practices being asked about by Finance Committee members.
