City Manager Tom Aspell struck a positive tone when it comes to the city’s progress towards addressing inequality at the end of racial equity training for current and incoming councilors.
“This will be fun,” he told councilors about the equity work ahead of them. “If you really look at what this community has done, what community of 45,000 has seven free neighborhood pools that provide free swimming lessons to any child in that community?”
Although Tuesday’s meeting was open to the public, it was designed to give the city’s all-white council the tools to understand how government laws and policies maintain racial inequity and to help them develop a shared language for discussing diversity, equity and inclusion.
The three-hour training, conducted by the municipal organization the National League of Cities, was a step towards the council’s commitment in a statement issued after the murder of George Floyd to solicit broader community input on what remains to be done to address racial inequities in Concord.
Trainers from the National League of Cities’ Race, Equity and Leadership Program gave councilors a primer on racial justice terms and concepts as well as a brief history of American policies that have targeted or discriminated against various racial and ethnic groups. The trainers led the session virtually, while the council met in person.
During the training, councilors discussed their own reactions and suggested next steps for applying some of the ideas to the broader community.
After a segment in which it was explained that people can act on implicit biases against groups of people without intentionally holding prejudiced beliefs, Ward 2 Councilor Erle Pierce posed a question to longer-serving councilors about how the concept might apply to Concord’s governing body.
“Has this chamber been guilty, or have we bumped up against that in as long as you’ve been here?” Pierce asked.
“Yes, is the short answer,” said Zandra Rice Hawkins, one of the council’s newest members, in response. “The first step on this course is acknowledging bias. And I think that we’ve had some examples recently, where we struggled to do that on the council.”
Rice Hawkins, who represents Ward 10, referred to choices about the language included in the statement the council issued after George Floyd’s death and to decisions about how to evaluate the Concord Police Department’s policies.
In August, the Public Safety Advisory Board reviewed the police department’s practices against recommendations issued by the state’s Law Enforcement Accountability Community and Transparency Commission. While the department met the majority of the LEACT Commission’s recommendations, officers do not wear body cameras and the department does not collect racial data on stops.
The advisory board voted not to perform a step-by-step review of 2015 recommendations issued by President Obama’s 21st Century Policing Taskforce.
In June 2020, some Concord residents had called on the city to reallocate funding from the police budget to social services. Instead, the council approved across-the-board pay increases for officers on top of contractual raises in 2020, and other increases in 2021, boosting police spending to $14.2 million.
During Tuesday’s meeting, councilors talked about their own experiences of acknowledging and undoing implicit bias, and discussed strategies to make city government more accessible to a wider range of residents by intentionally designing meetings to pull in new voices and recruiting a broader pool of committee members.
Mayor Jim Bouley noted that budgeting was one of the council’s most important tasks and a key time to consider equity. Bouley said the Council’s annual session to set agenda priorities in January was another opportunity to consider how to include more members of the community.
“This is not the end-goal around this table, this is the beginning of a process that we have to shape,” At-Large Councilor Byron Champlin said. “I think we need to start to create opportunities to listen to our community, our entire community, our New American community, our communities of people of color who are not New Americans and our old-time Yankee families.”
Aspell noted that the city’s composition had diversified in the past few decades, changing the community the council seeks to more fully engage.
Data from the 2020 Census shows that the Heights is one of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in New Hampshire. In Concord, 66.1% of the population identified as “white only” in the most recent census, a smaller percentage than the state as a whole, where 88.3% of the population is white.