Not surprising, since it’s a university town, Charlottesville is almost as solidly Democratic as San Francisco or Baltimore (79% for Obama in 2008; 76% in 2012). Indeed, it is so Democratic that in 2006, when a local paper reported that the Democrats had launched a major effort to “retake” the city council, unwary readers might suspect that somehow they’d lost control and were trying to regain their lost majority. In fact, what had happened is that in 2002 a lone Republican had managed to win one of the 5 seats, for the first time in 16 years. In short, as I noted at the time,
to Charlottesville Democrats “retake” means ousting the only Republican and returning to a council that is made up only of Democrats.
And these Democrats, mind you, are true-blue, college town Democrats. As such, they are all such firm believers in “diversity” that they believe achieving it is important enough to justify discriminating against some people based entirely on their race or ethnicity. (That’s what racial preference requires.)
In short, the Democrats all stand for “diversity.” But they can’t stand it on the city council, where they prefer the easy harmony of lockstep, one-party groupthink.
Some observers, if they noticed, might find it odd or ironic (others of us would not) that cities with overwhelming Democratic majorities often believe they suffer from rampant, pervasive, systemic human rights abuses. The Charlottesville city council was so concerned about the oppression of its minorities that in 2013 it appropriated just under $200,000 to create a “Human Rights Commission” whose mission was “[t]o act as a strong advocate for justice and equal opportunity by providing citywide leadership and guidance in the area of civil and human rights” and “[a]ct as an advisory body to City Council in matters pertaining to human and civil rights.”
Earlier this month the HRC director, Zan Tewksbury, abruptly resigned.
An experienced civil rights attorney, she was hired in October 2013 with a salary of $72,000 and a budget of $197,000 to run what was then still a new endeavor. Four months earlier, the city had passed an ordinance allowing it to tackle discrimination locally with a two-part approach: Tewksbury’s office would take in complaints and help resolve them through mediation or refer them to other agencies, while the Human Rights commission would adjudicate persistent complaints and tackle issues of systemic racism in the city.
The ordinance was hailed as a partial victory by those who had long advocated for local civil rights enforcement powers; it limited the OHR’s oversight to complaints against city businesses with 15 or fewer employees. Claims against bigger employers were to be passed along to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, while housing complaints would be handed off to the Piedmont Housing Alliance.
So, what did the city get for its $270,000 per year investment? “Success in facilitating conversations.”
While the commission reported success in facilitating conversations about race and civil rights in the city and collected 107 discrimination complaints, it hadn’t officially resolved any complaints. None of the 39 employment-related claims received fell under its purview—they involved companies that were too large or were located outside the city. Another 24 complaints were deemed to be “systemic” problems, the most common being biased policing. In all, the commission itself was able to address just 10 complaints. None are resolved.
According to Charlottesville City Manager Maurice Jones, it is “important to look beyond complaint adjudication when judging the effectiveness of the commission: It has helped refer many complaints to the EEOC and other bodies, he said, and is an important part of community conversations about discrimination.”
Charlottesville, in short, pays dearly for its “conversations about discrimination.” (Simply creating a blog, I can say on the basis of some experience, would have been much less expensive … and the quality of the conversations would no doubt also have been much higher.)
