Mayor Buttigieg’s Record Regarding Hispanics in Leadership and Business
How did Hispanics fare in leadership and economic development under Mayor Pete Buttigieg?
With persistent national focus on his “rocky” relationship with South Bend’s African-Americans, Mayor Buttigieg’s record with our city’s Hispanic residents is less well understood. Yet as the primary season shifts to states with large Hispanic populations, attention is moving to the experiences of our city’s sizable Hispanic community — comprising more than one out of every seven South Bend residents.
This column presents the first in-depth analysis of Mayor Buttigieg’s administration regarding Hispanics in city leadership, and South Bend’s contracting with Hispanic-Owned Business.
I.Hispanics in City Leadership
The City of South Bend recently filed its legally required 2019 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Report, which presents demographic data for all South Bend city employees as of June 30, 2019.
For the departments listed under the EEOC report’s “Function One” — including the Mayor’s Office, City Legal, Human Rights, Administration and Finance, and Human Resources — the Buttigieg administration identified just one Hispanic among the twenty-six Administrators and Officials leading these offices.
The EEOC defines “Administrators and Officials” as those employees who “set broad policies, exercise overall responsibility for execution of these policies, or direct individual departments or special phases of the agency’s operations”. Hispanic representation of 3.8% among these City of South Bend leaders is well below their proportion of South Bend’s population, which, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is 15.3% Hispanic.
Other city departmental leadership also vastly underrepresented Hispanics. The Office of Community Investment, which handles the city’s economic development and neighborhood relations, did not employ a single Hispanic among fourteen Administrators and Officials. In this entire department, South Bend’s 2019 EEOC report identified just one Hispanic among thirty-eight employees — an Administrative Assistant earning under $43,000 annually.
Community Investment was not alone in lacking any Hispanic representation in leadership. Housing, Transportation and Utilities, Police, Streets, and other South Bend city departments did not list a single Hispanic among their Administrators and Officials.
In total, the 2019 EEOC registers just four Hispanics among the one hundred and forty-five Administrators and Officials in the City of South Bend, or 2.7%, roughly a sixth of the proportion Hispanics represent in the South Bend community. This represents a decline from the 4.6%, or three out of eighty-four, that Hispanics comprised in the same category in the 2009 EEOC report of the Luecke administration.
The EEOC report does not include direct mayoral appointees to department head positions, such as Police or Fire Chief, or appointees to city boards that oversee specific departments. Yet there is evidence from the Buttigieg era that Hispanics were profoundly under-represented in these positions as well.
Regarding department heads, in December 2019 Democracy in Color published a report finding substantial turnover among city department leadership under Mayor Buttigieg. And despite having many opportunities to hire to these positions, of the twenty-eight department heads appointed by Mayor Buttigieg during his two terms in office, just one was identified as Latino.
There have also been anecdotal reports that Mayor Buttigieg passed over better qualified African-American and Hispanic leaders to helm departments; Jonathan Larsen of TYT published an account from several former officials in the South Bend Fire Department about Mayor Buttigieg’s replacement of Chief Howard Buchanon with Steve Cox. According to Larsen, “two other candidates, however, both Hispanic, were more experienced… [and] Buchanon had almost twice the years on the job.”
Yet Cox, a white firefighter who had connections to Buttigieg donors, and who was friendly with Mayor Buttigieg’s chief of staff, was appointed chief. Buchanon retired.
Eight years later, diversity among fire personnel is low: the 2019 EEOC reports that of 181 full-time “Protective Service Workers” in the South Bend Fire Department, only 4% (8) identify as African-American, and 2% (5) as Hispanic.
Regarding board appointments, in 2016 I published a South Bend Tribune op-ed critical of the Buttigieg administration for low and declining representation of African-Americans and Hispanics in city leadership. Before publishing my claim that “department leadership in the Buttigieg administration has little diversity, an injustice compounded by the mayor’s exclusive board appointments”, the Editorial Board of the Tribune asked the Mayor’s Office for any data or evidence that the Mayor had appointed a Hispanic or African American to the Parks Board or Redevelopment Commission, the boards specifically mentioned in my work. The Mayor’s Office was not able to provide any.
The Parks Board oversees the Parks Department, which according to the 2015 EEOC report, had no African-Americans and just one Hispanic among its top-paid twenty-seven employees.
The Redevelopment Commission is perhaps the most powerful board in city administration, allocating tens of millions for development projects, while overseeing the economic development department. In 2016, the beginning of Mayor Buttigieg’s second term, neither the Redevelopment Commission nor the Department of Community Investment had a single Hispanic appointed or employed.
II. City of South Bend Contracts with Hispanic-Owned Business
In Mayor Buttigieg’s first term, annual City of South Bend contracting with Hispanic Owned Business has varied between sixty-six thousand dollars and four hundred thirty thousand dollars.
In his second term, contract amounts have declined each year for which we have data from the city’s annual diversity in purchasing reports. [The Buttigieg administration issued a report in 2016 that did not break out city contract amounts according to race.] In 2017 the City of South Bend spent $300,392 on Hispanic Owned Business, out of over $101 million spent that year; in 2018 City of South Bend contracts with Hispanic Owned Business fell to $5,465. The 2019 report has yet to be published.
Why did city spending on Hispanic owned business remain low and decline sharply? The Buttigieg administration has referred to the small presence of minority and women owned business in local markets. Yet emphasis on the metric of market “utilization” can ignore systemic factors that suppress minority and women owned business from beginning or continuing in the market. Indeed, a 2019 consultant report contains substantial testimony from South Bend regarding minority and women entrepreneurs’ experiences of diminishing or closing firms.
One important systemic factor, already presented above, is the low proportion of Hispanics in city leadership. Another is absence of Hispanics from direct administration and oversight roles in South Bend’s economic development sector. A third is the littleness and lateness of focus on minority and women owned business development by the City of South Bend; the Buttigieg administration’s partnership with the West Side Small Business Resource Center, located in one of the city’s more diverse neighborhoods, came only in 2018 and involved just $30,000 in city funding. And a fourth reason may be that the City of South Bend board meant to promote minority and women owned enterprise became non-functional.
As I wrote in a recent column on city contracts with African-American Owned Business, “in 2014 the minutes of the Minority and Women Business Enterprise Diversity Board reflect concerns about increasing the number and capacity of minority and women owned businesses, streamlining and improving communication between the city and these businesses, creating a list of certified businesses, documenting best practices by other cities, changing a difficult city website for purchasing, and protesting Mayor Buttigieg’s proposal to reduce the hours of the city diversity compliance officer by roughly 40%. Often announced was the need to improve the attendance of Board members, whose absences repeatedly left the board without a quorum that year.
This Board has appointees by Mayor Buttigieg and is meant to work closely with members of his administration. But following the airing of these challenges and complaints, the Board did not get to work. As noted in a prior column, and also in a June 2019 op-ed published in the Michigan Chronicle, this city Board did not meet for the following three-and-a-half years, from late 2014 until early 2018.
Meetings that did occur in 2018 were canceled or stymied by lack of a quorum. A July 2018 meeting, for example, had just two of nine members present. There are no minutes yet posted for 2019.
Since 2012, this Minority and Women Business Enterprise Diversity Board has not posted annual reports on city spending, with the exception of 2015. Records of the membership of the board involved with promoting minority business opportunities have not been updated since 2015.”
Other factors that may have driven low levels of city spending on minority owned business include those described in a 2019 report by Colette Holt and Associates. Following a litany of recorded complaints of bias, poor communication, and exclusion in city contracting by South Bend minority and woman business owners, this analysis of diversity in city purchasing concluded that the City of South Bend had not collected even basic data on city contractors — which delayed the report’s release. The report also found that the city office of diversity was undersized, and that the city lacked a basic electronic system to track contracts.
Conclusion
As with African-Americans, representation of Hispanics in the leadership of the Buttigieg administration has remained profoundly below their proportion in our community. In important employment sectors of the City of South Bend, Hispanic representation regressed during Mayor Buttigieg’s tenure. Basic public process to promote minority owned business faltered for years. City spending on Hispanic Owned Business vacillated and then declined, according to the city’s annual reporting. Yet this record remains largely unknown, locally and nationally.
