The rapidly changing demographics in California made itself evident in the recent elections is presenting major challenges to cities and counties throughout the state.
Knowledge of demographic trends, the characteristics of growing and declining populations, and intergroup relationships among residents in a community is critical to the management of local government. Planning decisions on
where and what types of developments should occur, public works decisions on the placement of roads, transit decisions, law enforcement resource allocations, even decisions as to the design of parks require knowledge of the
population and the impact the decisions are likely to have on them.Existing systems designed to assess the impact of policies and decisions by local government on the residents of a community are premised on the assumption that
the population is homogenous, fluent in English, and aware of the political process. Planning commissions, recreational departments, public works departments, etc. all have prescribed methods for publicizing and holding
public hearings. They are designed to elicit information to help assess the feasibility of going forward with a project and determining what kinds of accommodations need to be made to gain a critical level of public
support.
Unfortunately, existing systems for getting public input and assessing the human impact of local government decisions do not work in a city or county with people who are relatively new to the area and
unfamiliar with the system; with people who are not fluent in English and cannot read the public notices nor communicate effectively in a public meeting; and with people who will not participate because they do not feel they can
have a voice in the way local government operates. The problem is that in many communities within California the fastest growing populations are people who will not be reached by cities and counties using traditional methods
for gaining public input. If local government is to be responsive to the residents they serve, they need to develop new avenues for reaching out to the changing population and be able to assess the impact of their decisions
on them.
About 60 cities and counties in California have some form of human relations or human rights commission. A tacit, if not expressed, goal of virtually all commissions is to ensure their local government is inclusive and
sensitive to the needs of the diverse communities of peoples who reside in their jurisdiction. A few commissions have enough resources and capacity to help underrepresented communities get their needs heard when a crisis
point has been reached. Unfortunately, this process is not a routine part of governance and occurs only infrequently under extreme circumstances.
A few commissions are fully staffed and have specific responsibilities, but
most exist to buffer elected officials from residents reacting to incidents involving law enforcement, schools, or intergroup conflicts. Human relations commissions are rarely part of the local government management
team that conducts planning, designs and implements programs, and makes decisions about increasing and reducing local government services. Instead they are generally viewed by local elected officials and public administrators
as buffers protecting local government without being an integral part of the body. As a result human relations commissions have little impact on the day to day governance of the community and, in the absence of a crisis, they
are a low priority budget item.
A human relations commission staffed with people who can maintain relationships with new and emerging populations and facilitate their input on public policy and decision-making should be seen as a
vital asset to communities going through rapid demographic shifts. They can enable city and county governments to more effectively address the challenges of serving changing populations and continue to work on maintaining
harmonious intergroup relationships.
The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission is beginning to make some tentative steps in this direction through its collection and analysis of hate crime data. Staff has
been working with demographers to analyze patterns of hate crimes within the county and identifying characteristics common to those areas where there is a high incidence of reported hate crime. For example, hate crime in Los
Angeles County is found to occur frequently at the intersection of communities whose people have disparate income and racial characteristics. It is also found to occur more frequently in communities undergoing rapid declines
in the population of one racial or ethnic group and rapid increases in the population of another. The demographers are now proposing to determine what factors might be leading to the conflicts. While the results may not
be surprising, the documented information can be used to determine how resources should be directed in the schools and other local agency programs in those areas.
Because most human relations commissions are under-funded and
under-utilized they carry little political clout. It is likely that a strategy to change their roles and integrate them into the governing structures of cities and counties may require enlisting the support of organizations
that city and county officials look to for guidance.
There are many issues that would need to be explored if CAHRO is going to pursue this direction, including but not limited to: the implications of this on
the structure and design of commissions, the capacities that would have to be developed, and where commissions should be situated within the structure of local government.
