After the NY Times reported on the apparent lack of diversity among Mayor Bloomberg's senior City Hall staffer, the City Council may be taking a look. According to the Times, "The New York City Council is considering holding oversight hearings into racial and gender diversity at the top levels of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration, according to council members."
Councilwoman Deborah Rose (D-SI) told the Times, "Having recently brought in three out-of-town, white males as deputy mayors, the mayor has once again shown an indifference to living up to his own vows to bring diversity to his administration. In 2010, we must do more to ensure greater opportunities for all citizens." Those three recent deputy mayor hires were political consultant Howard Wolfson (Deputy Mayor For Government Affairs), former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith (Deputy Mayor for Operations) and former Treasury official and Goldman Sachs executive Robert Steel (Deputy Mayor for Economic Development); they all replaced white, male staffers.
Former Council member and current City Comptroller John Liu weighed in, "In a city of 8.4 million people, at some point the law of large numbers kicks in, and it’s just not legitimate to say, ‘Oh, this is only on the merits,’ because it somehow implies that there’s a lack of skill or talent in certain communities, and that is just absolutely not true and unacceptable. Nobody is talking about political correctness; this is about looking for skills and talent everywhere in the city and not limiting the places you go to look for this talent."
But former Mayor Ed Koch was sympathetic, "You say to yourself, as I know Bloomberg does, that the first thing I want to do, particularly in difficult times, is to get the best people who can do a good job, irrespective of whether they are green, white, Hispanic or Asian." And former Dinkins-era commissioner Kenneth Knuckles says he's given been given hiring advice to Bloomberg officials, "You have to look long and hard — it’s not as easy as one would think to find highly qualified minority candidates I think they want to do it, but obviously they haven’t gone far enough."
Today, City Room reports, "A reporter for The Times who on Wednesday attended Mr. Bloomberg’s first public event since the article was published was not selected by the mayor to ask a question, even though the reporter was sitting in the center of the front row and even though the mayor’s staff knew that diversity would be the topic."
