Mayor Soglin (left) knocks Ald. Cheeks for being motivated by “political ambition,” but Cheeks says his actions have “nothing to do with politics.”
During this year’s debate over the city budget, Ald. Maurice Cheeks blamed Mayor Paul Soglin for a lack of diversity among city staff. Cheeks pointed to a recent survey of employees that shows, five years into Soglin’s current tenure, “the culture still isn’t what it needs to be.”
“I appreciate the position the mayor is in. It’s his job to be protective of the staff,” said Cheeks at the Nov. 15 budget meeting. “It’s not a comfortable thing to say our culture doesn’t work. Particularly when we know that culture starts from the top down in any organization.”
The survey, conducted by the city’s Multicultural Affairs Committee and released in May, found that 60 percent of African American employees said they were treated differently by co-workers because of their race. Nearly a third of Hispanic employees also said race affected how they were treated. One employee described diversity at city hall this way: “We’ve got two kinds of city employees: German and Scandinavian.”
Cheeks and Ald. Sara Eskrich offered an amendment to the $300 million operating budget, cutting funding for a study on how the city can recruit and retain a diverse workerforce.
This week, Soglin accused Cheeks — who is rumored to be considering a run for mayor — with playing politics and thwarting attempts to address disparities in axing his proposed $100,000 study. “We’ve seen once again that the 2019 mayor’s race and personal political ambition is more important for some people than real, substantive steps to fix a problem,” the mayor says.
The funding Cheeks and Eskrich cut would have paid for an independent review of the city’s policies to improve diversity in recruiting and hiring practices as well as best practices in employee retention. The mayor credits the Madison Police Department with doing a “pretty good job” of recruiting a diverse workforce but says other city agencies lag.
“I want to know if there are folks out there who have ideas on how we can do better. Better in terms of how we recruit. Better in terms of how we retain. This may mean looking at how we advertise but also how we write our job descriptions,” says Soglin. “We’ve been relying on our own talent for years in this area. I thought, given what’s at stake here, it was worth a one-time investment of $100,000.”
The council voted 12-6 to reduce funding for the review by $90,000 and change how it will be conducted. The remaining $10,000 will be used by staff to evaluate “current policies, and identification of national best practices that could be incorporated.” The amendment also calls for using the expertise of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity — a national network of local governments (including Madison) working toward racial equity — to give feedback on the internal review of the city’s human resources policies.
Cheeks plans to introduce a resolution in January to clarify the objectives of the internal review of the city’s hiring process, with steps on moving forward. He calls the mayor’s proposal vague. “There frankly wasn’t clarity about what that $100,000 would be used for,” says Cheeks. “I hope that the mayor is willing to set aside political concerns and work together with me and the rest of the council.”
The mayor says the “feedback” Cheeks is counting on from the Government Alliance on Race and Equity is “total nonsense,” adding that the organization doesn’t have the capacity to do what Cheeks is asking.
“They never talked to Julie Nelson,” says Soglin, referring to the director of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity. “This is not in [the organization’s] wheelhouse.”
Nelson confirms that the Government Alliance on Race and Equity has not been contacted about this issue and would need to know more details about the request. But the organization has assisted other municipalities with internal reviews.
Soglin says Cheeks and Eskrich’s amendment on his study proposal shows the “shallowness of their commitment to equity in hiring.” But Cheeks says it’s “not responsible” to call the issue political. Neither he nor Soglin will confirm or deny whether they are running for mayor in 2019.
“This has nothing to do with politics,” says Cheeks. “This is about our responsibility to be responsive to the needs of our staff.”
Editor's note: This story was updated to correctly identify the Government Alliance on Race and Equity.
