The city and county now have diverse representatives – we got here through equal opportunity, not quotas

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Well, the dust has settled from the recent local elections and the voters in the city and county of Santa Cruz have voted in an exciting array of diverse representatives with respect to gender and race.

Of course there is always room for improvement, but in January we will have a county board of supervisors with two women out of five, one African American, a Latino and a Latina and our first LGBTQ+ representative. This is an excellent change and hopefully a trend we will see continue, as the board has been all male and mostly white for too long.

The Santa Cruz City Council, our largest city and county seat, is slightly less diverse than the previous council, but still has five women and one man, one African American, one Latina and one Iranian immigrant. With respect to race, this makes the council at least as diverse as the population of the city and certainly more diverse than many other institutions in American life.

And this is not just an anomaly. Most recent Santa Cruz city councils have been impressively diverse, which is a real change from our earlier history when the vast majority of councilmembers were all white and male. 

But how did we get here? And what can others fighting for diversity learn from us? 

I believe we are doing well because we’ve created an atmosphere of equal opportunity without falling into the trap of quotas and other special set-aside programs. These have proved hard to implement and unpopular across the county, even though most Americans support the idea of equal opportunity.  

We have shown there is another way. 

We achieved more diversity as the city and county moved from conservative control to more progressive politics starting in the 1970s and 1980s. This happened as community members became engaged in political struggles over environmental and social issues. These changing values contributed to the election of more diverse representatives, yes.  But, alone, this doesn’t explain how the shift actually occurred.

For that, we need to look more closely at the policies and programs the progressives, myself included, implemented once we became the majorities in local government here. 

 When I was first elected to the city council, in 1979, the city workforce of about 700 employees was about 20% female, in a community with 52% women. The workforce had under 1% people of color, in a city with about 20% people of color. By the time I left office, in 2010, the city’s workforce was over 50% female and close to 20% people of color. And slowly, but surely, the percentage of women and people of color in management and professional positions came closer to parity with city populations.

When progressives took control over the city and county and the Metro Transit District, we didn’t mandate hiring women or people of color or sexual minorities. We did track our success in such hires and promotions, but we basically worked to create fair hiring and promotion policies and practices for everyone. 

We abolished the longstanding practice that all city public works department hires had served in the U.S. Navy. We ended the practice of hiring depending on friendship networks since hiring or promotion panels often selected their friends or the children of their friends for open positions.

At the city and the transit district, we worked to ensure that hiring and promotion panels included both city employees and outside members employed in similar work.

Even more important, we made sure that the hiring decision-makers – the panels that recommended actions and the department heads who actually made the final decisions – had a diverse pool to select from. This required new outreach work. We also made sure that tests and educational requirements for employment were job-related and not culturally biased and unrelated to the actual job.  

Hiring bus drivers at the transit district came to depend on only a high school degree, a good driving record and a positive public service attitude, not years of higher education and being part of a friendship network of current employees.

Over time, the public workforces did come to better reflect the population they are serving. But we gave no extra points for being a person of color, a woman or a member of the LGBTQ community. We also didn’t require a certain percentage of the hiring pool not be white, male, etc. 

This made it fairer for everyone. It’s a model I think more communities might follow.

We also set out clear policies of non-discrimination once people were employed by a public agency. It took a while for these policies to positively affect the daily work experience. It did not happen overnight. 

The early diverse hires and promotions in every department, and especially in the police and fire departments, sadly had to put up with a lot of discriminatory behavior. But over time it became less of an issue, although I doubt it is a struggle that is complete yet.

I do think this model shows we can advance the struggle against racism, sexism and discrimination against sexual minorities without the use of self-defeating quota systems. But it does not happen without a commitment to that struggle. 

I’m reaffirming my commitment to this now, as the year ends – and I’m hoping many more of us will do the same. We will need strong resolve as we enter 2025.