Item 3A: Approval of City Council Minutes

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move forward with some concrete steps. She said the meeting reinforced the importance of not making assumptions. Mr. Papé said he appreciated all of the discussion and feedback from his group. He said there should be a method to determine how well the City was modeling desirable behavior throughout the organization. Ms. Taylor said she had not learned anything new in the meeting but recently learned there were a number of Native American tribes locally and people were very ignorant about them. She suggested the council could have a performance or educational activity during its ceremonial matters. She said that people found it disturbing when others had preconceptions about them. She thought that education was valuable but did not think there were any laws that discriminated in the community. She said it was good to talk to all kinds of people, including bigots, to find out why they had certain beliefs or feelings. She felt that the remaining biggest prejudice was against gays and lesbians. Ms. Ortiz said she also heard a sense of frustration with more discussion. She described a recent event of the Community Alliance of Lane County (CALC) she had attended and commented that youth at that event indicated a commitment to the work of CALC and awareness that it was an ongoing process as long as there were immigrants moving into the community. She emphasized the need to continue working on the issue on a daily basis until it was ingrained into the fabric of the community. In response to a question from Mr. Kelly, Mr. Chouinard said that the timeline in the initial action plan had been extended for a variety of reasons, but there was no reason that a joint meeting with the Human Rights Commission could not be scheduled in November and a facilitated council discussion scheduled in December. Mr. Kelly asked what the timeline would be for next steps to be worked out by an ad hoc committee as suggested under council options. Mr. Chouinard said that as a result of the Communities of Color meeting, there was a need to engage those communities in working with the council. He said the best approach seemed to be the formation of an ad hoc committee composed of twelve to fifteen people to produce a set of recommendations over a two-month period. He said those recommendations could be supplemental to the council’s work plan for race priority. Mr. Kelly indicated he was distressed by the timeline as there would be no council action until after the first of the year. He asked the Human Rights Commission to consider whether its joint meeting with the council should occur prior to or concurrent with formation of the ad hoc group or wait until the group had provided recommendations. Mr. Chouinard said he did not mean to imply that the council’s other activities related to the race priority should be suspended while the ad hoc committee was at work. Mr. Kelly said that a wonderful aspect of the meeting was that people felt comfortable asking tough questions or questions that might be perceived as “dumb.” He said engagement of the broad public was critical and suggested that staff and the ad hoc committee consider publication of a City human rights newsletter, similar to the stormwater and parks newsletters published annually. Mr. Papé stated that the council and City should model good behavior if it was expected of the community as a whole. He said he was not aware of any audits to ensure accountability of the City as an organization and measure progress against policies, but that should occur and the results published for community review. He said the City should lead by example. Mr. Chouinard replied that an assessment of the City organization had been conducted by a nationally recognized consultant and one result was current work on MINUTES—City Council September 11, 2006 Page 7 Work Session