The Healdsburg City Council is poised to adopt a resolution next week that has a lot of, well, potential. The resolution “acknowledging and embracing the community’s diversity; and expressing the city’s commitment to non-discrimination and inclusivity,” has the potential to bring Healdsburg residents together in strength and in solidarity.
On the other hand, it has the potential to fall far short, and in doing so, to lay the holes in our civic fabric bare.
The key question is this: Does the council, do we as a city, have the will to back up the nice words with action?
One needn’t look much further than a claim made early on in the resolution to start to doubt a positive outcome. The resolution reads: “The City of Healdsburg has established a long tradition of embracing its diversity, both culturally and economically.”
But do we? Really? It may very well be that most residents of Healdsburg and the entire city council value diversity in their hearts, but when we talk about inclusivity and non-discrimination, about embracing diversity on the city level, we are not referring to hearts and minds. Embracing diversity requires systems of inclusion, systems that we simply do not have in place.
At the council meeting on February 21, Leticia Romero, the executive director of local nonprofit Corazon, translated the meeting in Spanish for the many Spanish-speaking Healdsburg residents in attendance. This was an aberration, and was provided by the community group because of the direct relevance of the subject matter to the Latino community. But all city issues are potentially relevant to Spanish-speaking Healdsburg residents, and if we truly want to “ensure that [Healdsburg’s] immigrant residents participate in civic life and daily activities with the same freedoms, respect, and access to resources,” as the resolution claims we do, then the city must offer translation at meetings, as well as Spanish language agendas and web landing pages.
At the same council meeting and in letters to council members, residents from local groups BridgeLab and Indivisible Healdsburg , among others, suggested an amended resolution that moved away from vagaries such as “allocating resources necessary to support diversity, inclusion, and the values of a multicultural society” and towards naming some of the priorities that those resources should be allocated for.
An amended resolution might read: “Healdsburg shall allocate resources to provide legal education, citizenship services and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes, and Spanish translation at all City Council meetings and City Council agendas and City of Healdsburg website and public postings.”
An amended resolution could include language that adds “municipal agents, employee, or agency” to the Police Department’s policy of not asking for someone’s immigration status. It could include a web page on which any local ICE mobilization is reported, to help quell the rampant rumors of raids and the terror and civic retreat that those rumors cause.
Despite the more than 20 passionate and evidence-based requests from constituents to strengthen the resolution before passing it, the council seemed loath to change anything that would require them to revisit the document in public before voting. This resistance was so strong that merely adding in a clause about Spanish translation (which a majority of the council members favored) was scrapped simply because it would have had this effect.
So I am not particularly optimistic that the council will do anything other than pass this pleasant, if toothless, resolution on Monday night.
I strongly urge the council, then, to follow this up with a meaningful plan for implementation. If it doesn’t, if these words remain just words, if we cannot keep our promises of safety to each other now, the damage we will cause will not be undone.
What a tragedy it would be if all of these nice words went to waste.
Jenny Levine-Smith is a Healdsburg resident.
