LYNN — The hiring of a diversity, equity, and inclusion officer proposed in Mayor Thomas M. McGee’s supplemental budget will be moving forward, after facing some initial pushback from the City Council about a lack of clarity and communication surrounding the position from the mayor’s office.
“The minority community said that the position is very important to them,” said Council President Darren Cyr. “And the council wants to respect that, and make them feel as though they are being represented.”
A motion proposed by Cyr, which recommended that the mayor take the money allocated in the general fund to hire the diversity officer to work out of his own office, was approved unanimously at Tuesday’s council meeting,
“It’s in the mayor’s hands,” said Cyr. “He can take the money that he proposed in the budget, and he can do what he wants with it. Now, he can hire whoever he wants with no input from the council.”
Members of the city council initially pushed back, not to the position, but to the process surrounding its creation.
“When it was first presented to us there was no job description, no qualifications,” said Ward 2 Councilor Rick Starbard.
“Right from the very beginning there was zero communication,” added Cyr. “That’s why the council was feeling the way they were feeling.”
When it was first proposed at council meeting in December, city councilors voted to defund the position — which originally had a proposed salary range of $72,000 to $90,000 — by decreasing funding for the role down to one dollar.
At the time, several city councilors expressed their support of the position itself, but Council Vice President Buzzy Barton and Starbard said they were not pleased with how the process surrounding the hire was conducted.
“Nobody in this room wants to see diversity more than I do, but I don’t like the way this was handled,” Barton told McGee at the December meeting. “The first time I heard about it was reading it in the paper. You just can’t do business like that. (We) need to know more about what’s going on with this job.”
Following that budget meeting, the council received more information about the diversity officer’s roles, which, Starbard said, would deal with hiring oversight, outreach to minority communities about job opportunities, outreach to minority-owned businesses about getting involved in city business, and training for the civil service test, among other roles.
Cyr said he also reached out to the minority community in Lynn, which reported significant support for the new role.
He still had reservations about the lack of clarity surrounding the position, saying “they gave us some information but not enough.”
“If we’re going to be spending tax dollars on a position we want to be sure that that person has enough work to last the year,” Cyr added.
Starbard expected that a job posting for the position would be released shortly after the vote taken by the council Tuesday night.
Guthrie Scrimgeour can be reached at [email protected].
