The following letter was published in this week’s issue of the Gazette.
To the editor:
Croton is woke. We have a village Diversity & Inclusion Committee and our school district is busy “leveraging the brilliance” of our community to ensure “anti-oppressive pedagogy.” If someone deviates from the norm in Croton, they are quickly and firmly dealt with: maybe just a private ultimatum from the Mayor to take down a flag, maybe pelted in the street with eggs and water bottles, on occasion it is even necessary to insert a bill of attainder into the Village Code to take down a flag.
However harshly Croton deals with minority viewpoints, it is all for a good cause. We are a diverse community of minorities, and committed to even greater diversity as we move forward. Well, except for one uncomfortable fact: we don’t practice what we preach (and enforce). Hate has no home here, but hypocrisy is a different story.
The top two appointed positions in Croton are Village Manager and Village Treasurer. When those positions became vacant, the Board of Trustees chose to replace the two retiring female occupants (one a woman of color) with two white male replacements.
Now I assume that Mr. Pugh and I share a vested self-interest in making sure that white guys get jobs, but unlike Mr. Pugh, I also think that it is important to have a diverse workforce—particularly when the taxpayers are footing the bill.
Croton has never been shy about paying top dollar for talent. The budgeted base salaries for FY 21-22 are Village Manager ($180,000), Village Engineer ($171,907), Police Chief ($165,000), Supt. of Public Works ($164,424) and Village Treasurer ($137,751). Add in pension and bennies, and you are talking way over a million dollars in spending.
“Croton is woke. We have a village Diversity & Inclusion Committee and our school district is busy “leveraging the brilliance” of our community to ensure “anti-oppressive pedagogy.” If someone deviates from the norm in Croton, they are quickly and firmly dealt with . . . However harshly Croton deals with minority viewpoints, it is all for a good cause. We are a diverse community of minorities, and committed to even greater diversity as we move forward. Well, except for one uncomfortable fact: we don’t practice what we preach (and enforce). Hate has no home here, but hypocrisy is a different story.”
Is it really that difficult to find a diverse workforce? Ms. King was overqualified and commensurately overpaid. Her replacement is 30 years old. Not 30 years work experience…30 birthday cakes. I am sure he is a nice guy and all, but if the job qualifications to be selected can be met at that level, there should have been no difficulty in the Board of Trustees obtaining a large and diverse applicant pool.
Benchmarking against the available pool is standard nowadays for any major Human Resources department. If the powers that be in Croton spent less time silencing political speech and devoted that time to rooting out systemic racism, benchmarking applicant pools would be a good place to start. As a municipal corporation, Croton should have a written policy that has defined criteria to maximize the diversity of the applicant pool. There should also be sufficient transparency to assure that the process is not rigged to favor a particular outcome.
In the case of the candidate pool for jobs in public administration, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that almost half of your national applicant universe is female. Black and Latino [sic, the feds didn’t get the “latinX” memo] employees in the public administration field are over-represented (17.5 and 13.1 percent respectively) relative to both their workforce participation rate and by occupation. That holds true with the upcoming job market entrants: a Georgetown Univ. study showed that the undergrad majors with the highest concentration of Black and Hispanic students were law and public policy.
We are in the New York metro area. It might surprise the Croton Board of Trustees to know that there are a lot of women and minorities working in government. Our all-white, all-male Croton management team is the exception in 2021.
If you want to see the effects of systemic racism, look no further than the replacement of a BIPOC woman in the position of Village Treasurer.
The accounting profession has made major efforts to deal with the lack of gender and ethnic diversity. A big part of the problem is cultural—many students going into accounting programs have older relatives who are accountants. Today women are approaching parity in the field, although still disproportionately lacking at the upper levels. The story of BIPOC accountants is a different story. Black accountants in particular have been rare to the point of virtual nonexistence, and even today are only 8.4 percent of the profession.
Invoking “systemic racism” is commonly used to shut down discussion. In the case of the hiring selection practices of the Village of Croton’s Board of Trustees, it is a fair framework for an honest analysis.
I am not saying that the Board of Trustees should hire on the basis of gender or race. I am saying that it is a statistical improbability that in the NY metro area the Board of Trustees can only find white males to fill the top slots. If we are to address systemic racism, it is not sufficient to “leverage the brilliance” of our community and spout buzzwords of wokeness.
Eradication of “systemic” racism in Croton means changing, well…. the “system” used in Croton. That starts with knowing how a qualified random applicant pool should look in terms of gender and ethnic composition. If the pool deviates significantly, then ask the question as to why.
If tradition dictates a certain system for job posting and winnowing of candidates, and the outcome of that system does not reflect the diversity of the relevant job classification, that is a classic definition of systemic racism. Re-do the search after you have fixed the bias in the posting and selection process.
In 2021, there is no excuse for Croton’s municipal workforce becoming less diverse. There is nothing wrong with joining diversity committees and putting up lawn signs to denounce systemic racism. There is something wrong when we as a village talk one thing but do the opposite.
Paul Steinberg