Centre Region municipality employees are mostly white. Few have plans to address that
From police officers to administrative staff, employees at Centre Region townships and boroughs are predominantly white. And while diversity, equity and inclusion is a focus for many municipalities through strategic plans, resolutions and proclamations, few municipalities have plans in place to increase diversity.
Of the 882 employees that racially identifying data was available for in Centre Region municipalities and the Centre County government, 61 employees (6.9%) identify as a race other than white. Centre County’s 2020 census shows 87.8% of residents are white alone, 4% are Black or African American, 6.1% are Asian, 1.8% are two or more, and 3.1% are Hispanic or Latino; 47.2% are female.
The Centre Daily Times filed Right to Know Requests to the county and all municipalities in the Centre Region for the names, titles, start date, race and gender of its current employees. Some municipalities, like College, Halfmoon and Harris townships, only have employees who are white. Others have few female employees.
Reflective of who they serve?
Local activist Tierra Williams is the first Black woman to serve on the Ferguson Township board of supervisors, after being elected last fall. She’d like to see more non-white employees in local government, as well. When there is a diverse workforce, there are different opinions and ideas that otherwise might not have been brought up.
“The world is diverse. So when you’re talking about workforces, when you’re talking about elected officials, you’re talking about government entities, they need to represent who they’re representing and it’s not straight white men. ... The country has never been all straight white men. But that’s always been the representation. And it’s about time to change that up,” Williams said.
Less than 10% of the Centre County government’s employees reported to be a race other than white in the 2021 EEO survey. It’s an annual, voluntary survey, John Franek, county administrator, said, and is used for different types of reporting purposes. In 2021, the county had 600 employees. Of the 594 who responded, 341 (57%) identified as female and 253 identified as male.
Of the 583 who responded to questions of race, nine were Asian (1.5%), 18 Black (3%), 11 Hispanic (1.8%), seven had more than one race. The remaining 538 employees were white (92%).
Franek estimated that between 2020 and 2021 there was a “slight increase” in the diversity of employees, but it was too early to know what 2022 would look like comparatively. Do the numbers concern the county?
“We’re very sensitive to it. We also know the reality of what our makeup is in the county. Personally, I don’t believe these numbers are that far off of reflecting; they may be a little bit low,” Franek said. “We encourage … and look for individuals from outside of the county. So it’s not that we are limiting ourselves to what is available locally, as far as ... qualified individuals.”
Doug Erickson, Patton Township manager, said creating a more diverse workforce is a “worthy goal” and the right thing for the community. The township has been working on new hiring principles to help move the township toward a more diverse and inclusive workforce.
The township employs 49 people; 12 of which are female and three identify as a race other than white. The township’s population is 15,650 according to the 2020 census, with 42.6% female and 10.8% Asian, 4.9% Black and 4.3% Hispanic or Latino.
“I mean, our purpose here, even though it sounds a little corny, is to serve the community. And we can do that best by putting people out there on the streets between police force and road crew, and people (they) see in the office who, you know, look more like them,” Erickson said. “I can’t think of a reason why we wouldn’t do it.”
In response to the RTK request, College Township said there aren’t any documents that contain information relative to gender that would be open under the RTK law, and that the township does not track the race of its employees. Based only on observations, the township manager said it appears that all of the 30 College Township employees are white, and nine appear to be female.
Mike Bloom, assistant College Township manager and whose role includes DEI, said the township would like to have a workforce that is representative of the community.
“Being a such a small operation, we don’t see a whole lot of turnover. Obviously, we would like to see the diversity of the workforce at least correspond with what we see in the community. But at the end of the day, we also are limited by, you know, what our applicant pool looks like, what the qualifications look like,” Bloom said.
Harris Township employs nine employees, three of which are female. All are white. Bruce Lord, chair of the Harris Township supervisors, said the volunteers the township has for its planning commission and parks committee, for example, have a lot of diversity.
“We also are heavily dependent upon our volunteers. And we have several, we call them ABCs, several committees, planning commission, shade tree commission, parks and recreation. And if you look at those, you’ll see quite a diversity there,” Lord said. “The parks committee is all women.”
Tom Fountaine has been the borough manager for 19 years, and recruitment and diversity in the borough’s workforce has been an issue and focus the entire time, he said. The borough State College Borough employs 203 people. Of that, 73 are female (36%) and 13 identify as a race other than white.
“I think it’s been a major area of concern in trying to have a workforce here that reflects the community that we serve, and we continue to place a high priority on that,” Fountaine said. “I think over the past three years, roughly 20% of our new hires have been from persons of color or underrepresented groups so we continue to make this a priority and continue to work hard to make sure that our workforce is diverse and represents the community.”
Halfmoon Township is the least populated and most rural of the Centre Region municipalities, with fewer than 3,000 residents, and about 92% are white. The township employs eight people, according to information provided by the township. One is female, and all of the employees are white.
“Halfmoon Township follows all state and federal guidelines regarding equal employment opportunities standard principle that asserts that all people should have the right to work and advance on the bases of merit and ability, regardless of their race, sex, color, religion, disability, national origin, or age,” the board wrote in an emailed statement after declining interview requests.
Ferguson Township is the most diverse community in the Centre Region, according to 2020 census results. Ferguson Township’s board of supervisors made history this year with its first all-female board in the township’s history, and later hired Centrice Martin as township manager. Martin is thought to be the first Black manager of a borough or township in the Centre Region and is the first female manager of Ferguson.
Of the township’s 58 employees, 12 identified as female. But the township does not track the race of its employees, Martin wrote in response to the Right to Know Request and declined interview requests for this story.
Recruitment & hiring
Recruiting in any industry has been a challenge, especially through the COVID-19 pandemic. Local governments aren’t any different.
“It’s hard to hire a lot of positions in the public sector. We lost 664,000 jobs in the public sector through the pandemic and we’ve recovered almost none of them,” Amy Farkas, Harris Township manager, said. “So I think the concern is how can we keep up with the private sector and also provide opportunities for folks that are from diverse backgrounds.”
Franek said the county has, on average, 30 positions open most of the time. The county recently performed a salary study and has made adjustments to its pay scales.
“We surveyed almost a dozen other counties and other employee wage data sources,” Franek said. “It was an extensive, deep dive into the topic. It took almost 12 months to complete. … We’re really excited and happy with making these changes for the employees and we’re hoping that it will draw more people’s interest into working in local government.”
Most municipalities said they don’t have a lot of turnover and aren’t creating new positions each year. Open positions are typically posted on the municipality’s website and social media. Sites like Indeed have helped Harris a lot, Farkas said. They had a much larger reach and appeared to have a more diverse candidate pool when they utilized Indeed in addition to using their own internal and local resources.
Depending on the position, some might do a national search or use local government associations, like the National League of Cities. Leann Shaw, director of human resources at State College, said the borough has lists of organizations that primarily work with the military or African American students, for example, to recruit different backgrounds.
But for someone to move anywhere away from home, the community and surrounding area also needs to be inclusive and comfortable. Shaw, while recruiting for the police force, recalled a time when someone asked where in State College an African American female could get her hair done. Ensuring they have those answers and resources is important, Shaw said.
Solutions
Williams feels strongly that every municipality needs an entire diversity, equity and inclusion department. One individual could work within human resources, another could work with public relations, recruitment of diverse organizations or entities that the township should be involved in.
“Those type of things are what we need, and it shouldn’t just fall on the township manager, or just one person. It could be a whole department and that would hire a minimum of three people working in diversity at each township if they just did that alone,” Williams said. “So with the five municipalities, that’s 15 people, hopefully of color, that would be working in those positions.”
But no Centre Region municipality has a DEI department, though State College is in the process of hiring a new role.
State College’s 2022 budget includes a director of diversity, equity and inclusion. The recruitment has been open for a while, Fountaine said, and they’re still in the interview stage. As part of that team, there will be a role for recruitment and hiring, and retention of a diverse workforce, he said. There will also be a role to assist with training, policy reviews and community relations, specifically to address equity and inclusion in the borough.
Williams also suggested local governments could create temporary internships that aren’t just for college students to get people involved to see if it’s something they’d like to do, and help people get that exposure.
Having a specific diversity recruitment day where leadership is specifically looking for diverse candidates for a vacancy is another way to better recruit diverse candidates, Williams said.
Patton is creating new hiring principles to help move the township toward a more diverse and inclusive workforce, which Erickson first presented to the board of supervisors during their May 11 meeting. Erickson would like to have the hiring process in place by the end of 2022 and primarily will apply to the police force, but he envisions using it in all areas of hiring.
The process would allow the township to identify what is important. Instead of taking the top candidate, they’d create a pool of qualified candidates that meet a minimum number of qualifications. They’d then select hires from that qualified pool to meet one or more goals.
The goals presented during that meeting include creating a workforce that more closely aligns with the demographics of the township, creating a workforce with a high degree of professionalism, and creating a workforce with a sense of duty to serve the community.
“Obviously, I think, we want to move away from hiring white males, to be blunt about it,” Erickson said during the meeting. “Half the population of Patton Township is women, so we should probably look, especially on the police force, to add more women to the force. We heard tonight that 11% of the population is Asian American, so we should be trying to do that.”
This story was originally published August 18, 2022 at 11:16 AM.
