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.
We welcome your comments on the ideas expressed in this article.
