By Rebecca J. Barnabi
For Augusta Free Press
STAUNTON — Last week, Staunton City Council narrowed down 35 applicants to 18, bypassing the interview process, in hopes of creating the Staunton Equity and Diversity Commission.
“The goal is to listen and understand the root causes of disparities,” said Staunton City Council member Brenda Mead, who advocated for the commission’s creation. The commission will challenge assumptions and look for answers. Mead said the point of the group is to pull a diverse group of individuals together to identify disparity issues and find solutions. The commission members will be appointed “to advise City Council on ways to hear and understand the voices of all of our citizens, and not just a few.”
Normally, a nomination committee would have chosen the applicants for a commission, but Mead objected. However, City Council members decided that interviewing all 35 applicants would have been time-consuming. “But a worthwhile investment of time,” Mead said.
However, Mead and community members noticed something missing among the 18 applicants chosen: diversity. Mead said the applicants “skewed heavily to white, upper middle-class and abled.”
“That’s not representative [of the city’s diverse population],” Mead said. None of the applicants are low-income, none are disabled and only three chosen are Black. She said the applicants chosen did not represent the city’s “lived experience of reduced access” for individuals such as minorities, the disabled and low-income.
Mead’s passion for the creation of the commission comes from circumstances such as the fact that 40 percent of students at Mary Baldwin University are Black, but they do not stay in Staunton after graduation. The community loses when Black students leave. She wants more opportunities for Black women who graduate MBU to want to stay in Staunton. “That there’s a place here for them in Staunton.”
Mead said the commission will likely have 15 members, because it will have work to do and need several pairs of hands. Eighteen months ago, members of the local chapter of the NAACP made a request to Staunton City Council to form a commission.
All 35 applicants for the commission “are excellent people,” according to Mead, who knows all of them.
“So there really isn’t going to be a wrong answer,” Mead said of selecting 15 to serve.
Jennifer Trippeer moved to Staunton in 2019 after living in Waynesboro for 40 years. She applied to serve on the commission, but was not chosen.
“I would celebrate anybody who serves on it, but let’s make sure there’s equity in anyone who serves on it,” Trippeer said.
She said a couple years ago that city residents gathered information to show City Council inequity in the city’s resources and hiring practices, and the need for an individual to represent inequity on city boards. Although 13 percent of the city’s population identifies as Black, only 5 percent of the city’s staff is Black. Last year, City Council considered creating the commission and developed a questionnaire for city residents about equity, which was available on the city website. A request for applicants to join the commission began in March.
However, the applicants chosen still do not accurately represent the Queen City.
“White people in this country are vey privileged, and I’m white,” Trippeer admitted. She thought the point of the commission was to be an “actual diverse representation of what this community is, and it isn’t.”
According to Trippeer, the application process did not allow applicants to provide much information.
“But we really weren’t given the opportunity to express why we wanted to serve,” she said.
Trippeer said nobody was selected with a disability to serve on the commission. Representing the disabled is important “because it is the largest minority in the country,” she said, and includes all economic classes, races and ages.
“[Disability] crosses a lot of barriers, and I felt that it needed to be represented,” Trippeer, who is disabled, said.
A city which includes the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind and the Wilson Workforce and Rehabilitation Center in nearby Fishersville should have a representative of disability on an equity commission.
“Disability has been an issue with this City Council at least a year — their refusal to make things accessible,” Trippeer said. “The inequities that I see around us, I see how it hurts people I care about.”
She mentioned the fact that Dine-Out Downtown is not handicapped accessible when Beverley Street is blocked off to vehicle drive-through traffic.
“I just feel like they’re missing the boat,” Trippeer said of the commission.
On Wednesday, May 4, Mead said that Staunton Vice Mayor Mark Robertson made a motion to dissolve the commission, because he believed that Mead had revealed information she should not have to the public and the press. Mead said the information she shared contained no names and was shared in the interest of sharing data about the applicants.
Robertson’s motion was seconded, and the Council voted to further discuss the commission. In closed session, Mead said eight or nine applicants were interviewed, then the meeting was reopened to the public and Council discussed dissolving the commission. But at the end of the meeting, Robertson withdrew his motion.
Mead said that City Council will meet in closed session again on May 12 at 3 p.m. to interview more applications for the commission. The next step will involve the city manager collecting the scores for each applicant from each City Council member to determine who will serve on the commission.
“I think we agreed as a body to continue to find candidates,” Mead said. Each Council member was given the task to pick three people among the candidates who are Jewish, low-income and disabled for the commission.
“So, at this point in time, we’re going forward,” Mead said. She hopes to serve as liaison between City Council and the commission, but her term on Council ends Dec. 31. When elected more than four years ago, she said she made a “conscious effort to get out of my upper, white, middle-class bubble” and meet others in the community.
The NAACP request and also another situation “really were the impetus for forming this commission,” Mead said. When Council recently went through an analysis of city procedures and members of the public were invited to join by Zoom, some community members felt left out, including the disabled.
A $25,000 grant from the Virginia Risk Sharing Association paid for a consultant to assist the city in starting the commission. Mead said that VRSA assists small localities in mitigating lawsuit risks.
“It says a lot about how important it is for us as a city to understand the issues that our citizens have in getting their voices heard,” Mead said.
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Rebecca Barnabi
