There was a report in Friday's Strib that the Human Rights Dept. in St. Paul may be on the chopping block.
According to Tyrone Terrill he has heard rumblings that St.Paul's HR Dept "will be scaled back or consolidated with Mpls. or at the state level to cut costs." Laura Sether said that our "Mayor has not considered consolidation or merger of the dept. to save money." She went on to say in the report that "He's talking about changing the department and refocusing it, because they've done some duplicative stuff with other Civil Rights Departments in the past and he wants to focus more on employment and diversity." I attended the Civilian Review Authority Redesign meeting on Wednesday and it came to light that what remains of the CRA and any new casework will be handled temporarily by the Civil Rights Dept. There has been much confusion on this matter. The group spent over a half hour just trying to craft a clear statement as to how complaints are handled in the interim between now and when a new Authority is established. I see a dismantling of government services going on and the weight of the loss is falling disproportionately on the poor and the vulnerable. Core services seem not to include those most beneficial to poor people and minorities. Truth in Housing which was a boon to poorer people and would maintain the city's housing stock went bye-bye basically because the monied interests in the real estate industry lobbied, first of all for its total elimination and when that failed they accepted a compromise engineered by Dan Niziolek. This was a capitulation, not a compromise. It shifted responsibility for seeing that repairs are done by sellers before a house sold and shifted it to buyers who have 90 days to make repairs. In the Public Hearing industry representatives assured the Council that this would not be a hardship because 70% of home buyers are represented by realtors who will strongly recommend independent inspections. This begs the question of what happens to the other 30% who most likely are not as sophisticated and may not know what costs they will be incurring and do not make sellers give back or lower their sales prices. This whole thing was such a bad idea. The Council and our Mayor look more like Republicans every day. I suppose this is what the Mayor, or his spokesperson means when they talk of refocusing. When Laura Sether says the Mayor wants to focus more on employment and diversity I'm not really sure what is meant by that. Personally I'm pretty sick of the word 'diversity'. It's right up there with 'synergy' and 'proactive'. I'm not sure what is meant by 'employment'. Is that city employees? Is it making sure that contractors doing work with the city comply with the spirit if not the letter of affirmative action guidelines? Will the Department look closely at Heritage Park? Will they stop allowing waivers that relieve contractors from meeting city minority employment goals? So far I'm not encouraged by what I've seen. Tim Connolly Ward 7 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience http://launch.yahoo.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
