‘Honestly, I feel like crying–it’s that disappointing to me’: Portland DEI Office Under Fire for Lack of Results

Tensions ran high at Portland City Hall on Monday evening as the city’s “justice, diversity, equity and inclusion” (JDEI) office gave its first update to the City Council since being formed last year.

The city’s racial equity office has been without a director since May, when Umaru Balde, who joined the JDEI office in April 2023, resigned abruptly with little explanation.

Portland’s JDEI office was formed on the recommendation of the city’s Racial Equity Steering Committee, which itself was launched by then-Mayor Kate Snyder in July 2020, amid nationwide unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

[RELATED: Portland Schools’ Equity Push Aims for All Students to Have Equal Outcomes, Equal Experiences…]

Monday evening’s workshop marked the first time the JDEI office has presented on its work to the full City Council since it was funded in the city’s fiscal year 2023 budget.

Masi Ngidi-Brown, who has been serving the JDEI office’s interim director since Balde’s abrupt departure, started the workshop with a presentation detailing his office’s work over the past year.

According to Ngidi-Brown, the JDEI office spent the first three months in operation — from October through December 2023 — educating their staff at “Lunch & Learns.”

After three months of taxpayer-funded luncheon DEI education sessions, in January of this year the JDEI office began conducting a survey of all city employees as part of a “Culture & Equity Assessment.”

No data from this assessment was presented to the City Council, but is expected to be finalized and released this fall.

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Ngidi-Brown also stated that the JDEI has been accepted to the 2024 cohort of the National League of Cities’ Bond Markets & Racial Equity project, which is essentially a tool that the city will use to score Capital Improvement Project (CIP) proposals based on “racial equity.”

The final part of the presentation was led by City Recruiter Shae Gonzalez, who outlined her efforts to make applications for city staff positions more accessible, and ways for the city to retain its employees.

[RELATED: Gov Mills “Jobs and Recovery Plan” Diverted $1,000,000 to Maine DEI Commission…]

A common thread throughout the workshop was a frustration on the part of the City Council with the JDEI office not achieving tangible progress towards accomplishing the work that the Racial Equity Steering Committee had recommended in 2021.

“I think what the public is probably very anxious for is the ‘so what?'” said City Councilor April Fournier.

“Like, we did all this work, and I think that’s unfortunately what happens in many spaces,” Fournier continued. “We’ve seen that DEI comes out, everyone gets really excited, they’re like ‘I read this book, I joined this book club, this is great’ — and then, there is no follow-through.”

City Councilor Kate Sykes, former co-chair of the Maine Democratic Socialists of America, tore into the JDEI office and city staff for not following through on the recommendations of the Racial Equity Steering Committee.

“I feel like I’ve stumbled into the wrong meeting,” Sykes said. “There isn’t a thing that you’re telling me that is in this report that we’ve addressed, and I don’t understand how it is that we can allow that to happen here tonight.”

While Sykes thanked the JDEI office for their work and acknowledged the importance of the Human Resources Department’s hiring initiatives, she said she did not hear “one real, substantive thing about how we’re hiring people of color.”

“It doesn’t help to just not address the issues that were brought up in this committee,” Sykes said. “Honestly, I feel like crying–it’s that disappointing to me to come here and not have a substantive conversation about the issues that were addressed in this report.”

[RELATED: Portland City Council Approves Tourism Bureau’s $74,500 Promotion Campaign for ‘LGTBQ+’ and ‘BIPOC’ Markets…]

Later in the workshop, City Councilor Regina Phillips voiced her agreement with Sykes’ sentiments towards the JDEI office’s work, as well as her frustration that other city department heads — including Police Chief Mark Dubois — were not present for the workshop.

“I want to hear that the city council had a goal, and our goal was diversity, equity, inclusion — and it’s been that goal for that last several, several years,” Phillips said.

“Where are the department heads in all of this?” she asked, stating that the two employees staffing the JDEI office is not a sufficient number to carry out its work.

“For me, I’m like — I really want to see changes, and I want to see them fast,” Phillips said, adding that she wanted to know how many more people of color the city had hired and promoted since the JDEI office began its work.

“Let’s not forget — because you guys [city staff] are doing a great job — let’s not forget that this City of Portland is still a system, and it’s still a racist system,” Phillips said. “And that racist system needs to be changed.”

Anne Torregrossa, the City’s Human Resources Director, told the City Council during the workshop that they expect to begin advertising to fill the open JDEI office director position at the end of this week or early next week.

Torregrossa said they hope to find a new JDEI director sometime this fall. Neither the former director Umaru Balde’s resignation nor the reason behind his departure were mentioned during the workshop.

In an interview with the Portland Press Herald published Tuesday, Balde claimed that he did not resign from his position as director of the city’s JDEI office, but was “abruptly fired.”

Balde told the newspaper that he had signed a separation agreement to agree to resign his position in order to receive a $20,000 severance package, but he now regrets ever signing it.

Balde attributed his ousting to clashes with Portland City Manager Danielle West and Mayor Mark Dion, claiming that they continually shot down his attempts to act on the recommendations of the Racial Equity Steering Committee.

Balde said that after an employee performance improvement plan meeting with West in February, his weekly reports went unanswered and that two months later he was called into a meeting and fired.

“I don’t want to say it’s racism, but the level of disrespect and false claims, it feels like discrimination,” told the Press Herald.

Like several members of the City Council, Balde expressed disappointment with the work the JDEI office presented during Monday’s workshop.

“They are doing HR work, they aren’t doing DEI work,” Balde said. “The whole presentation was about hiring and retention, there was nothing about equity. There was nothing about how we respond to minority communities.”

On the city hiring a new JDEI director, Balde said that before a hire is made, the city needs to “make sure that the leadership in the city understand and can clearly define what this office is.”

“Because I was told that we would be building this plane as we fly it, and that did not work,” he added.

The date of the next City Council DEI workshop has not yet been set.