Finding a Green Way to Govern

A report released yesterday by the Washington D.C. based Economic Policy Institute reports that the Minneapolis area has the largest racial disparity in unemployment of any metropolitan area in the country. The report, called, Uneven pain—Unemployment by metropolitan area and race by Algeron Austin is also mentioned in a short article from the Minnesota Independent. The report reveals that the unemployment rate of blacks in 20.4 % in the Minneapolis areas compared to 6.6% for whites. That represents a ratio of 3 to 1 and a 13.8% difference. This is clearly not good news, but does suggest that I was on the right track when I identified closing the racial disparities in poverty and employment by raising the income and employment levels of poor people in Minneapolis as one of my 2010 top 5 priorities. I think that in some ways the City is well positioned to make progress on this based on the City-County Equity in Employment Action Team we established in 2008 to examine and implement best...

Last year I initiated an effort to conduct a "diversity audit" of the City's many boards and commissions. I was thinking that it would be great if the diversity of our advisory groups reflects the diversity of our City. If it doesn't, we should at least have some measure of how and where the reflection is off. In order to set goals and guide outreach and recruitment efforts some understanding, or snap shot, of how things stands today could be very helpful. While I wish we had had better participation (we got 194 of roughly 400 to complete the survey) I think this information is useful. I want to thank everyone who took the time to answer the questions and hope that this is something we can repeat every few years. The results seem to confirm what many expected, our booards and commissions are mostly euro-american, middle-aged, middle and upper class, heterosexual homeowners who work and live in Minneapolis. Of course we found out a lot more than that and more of the de...