Parks Turns a New Leaf For Unbiased Promotions; Spurred by Lawsuit Payout

Has the Department of Parks and Recreation of 2008 cleaned up its racial record when it came to promoting employees prior to the Bloomberg administration? Its management said this month it is making serious headway.

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow CLEANING UP PARKS PERSONNEL PRACTICES: Parks Department Equal Employment Opportunity Officer Ricardo Granderson told a City Council hearing that he has seen little evidence of racial discrimination in employee promotions. With him from left are Deputy Commissioner for Management and Budget Robert Garafola and General Counsel Alessandro Oliviero.

Stern Legacy

The administration in February agreed to pay $12 million in compensatory damages and back pay to current and former Parks Department workers who claimed in a Federal class-action lawsuit that they suffered racial discrimination under then-Parks Commissioner Henry Stern, whose tenure was marked by promoting recent graduates of top universities — nearly all of them white — over seasoned black and Latino Parks workers.

While city attorneys said that the $21-million settlement, which included an additional $9 million in legal fees, shouldn't be taken as an admission of guilt, worker advocates saw it differently. District Council 37 Local 983 President Mark Rosenthal said at the time, "They wouldn't have settled for this kind of money if they were not guilty."

Now comes the hard part, City Council Members said Oct. 24 during a joint committee hearing: the department needs to prove that it is making headway in promoting diversity.

Adhering to Federal Standards

Parks Deputy Commissioner for Management and Budget Robert Garafola told the Civil Rights and Parks and Recreation Committees that the department has adopted interview and recruitment methods that are in line with Federal standards to make it easier for black and Latino workers at lower levels of the agency to move up through the ranks.

"Parks has also partnered with the City University of New York to identify candidates who qualify and would benefit from the Continuing Worker Education Program," he said in his testimony.

Mr. Garafola added that the department's Parks Leadership Development Program, to begin in January, will be "committed to recruiting and selecting a diverse class."

He noted the department was working with union officials on promotions and job training as well.

Council Parks and Recreation Committee Chair Helen Foster waxed skeptical, noting that procedures may have changed but that she feared day-to-day life for minority workers hadn't. She added that if the department's leadership remained mostly white and male, then it was indicative of stasis.

Need Attitude Adjustment

"Has the attitude changed?" she asked. "We can have all the procedures in the world, but if the attitude hasn't changed, nothing's been done."

Parks Equal Employment Opportunity Officer Ricardo Granderson noted that only 2 percent of his investigations of EEO complaints in the past four years showed that there were systemic problems with diversity in the workforce. He also argued that his office had the ear of the administration and that he regularly attended Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe's cabinet meetings.

"That is something that most EEO Officers are not afforded or accorded," he said.

Adding that Mr. Benepe had recently appointed an African-American to a cabinet-level position and was receptive to his office's challenges to current personnel practices, Mr. Granderson added, "I think all of those opportunities, if you will, set a tone that ultimately filters down to both middle managers as well as low-level crew chiefs and supervisors."

One focus of the now-settled litigation was the allegation that Commissioner Stern's "Class Of" program filled executive positions with employees who were just a year or two removed from college because of a racial bias against more-experienced minority staffers who were serving in positions that traditionally had been the springboard to those jobs.

Highly Rated But Ignored

Paula Loving, a plaintiff in the case, had been the Citywide Coordinator of the agency's Work Experience Program, but was not allowed to apply for a new position as Director of WEP, which was given to a less-senior white employee. A Federal Judge had noted that Ms. Loving had been described by a supervisor as "smart, ambitious, reliable, a good communicator, and a very good worker." But the Director position was never posted, preventing her from applying for it, and it was filled initially by a white employee with significantly less experience in the WEP program. The job subsequently went to a white employee with less than a year on the job who had been hired right out of college.

The department has put a stop to this kind of approach, Mr. Garafola told the City Council, by ensuring that all job postings are widely disseminated throughout the department and that it "continues the practice of filling jobs whenever it can from within the agency through internal postings."

Mr. Rosenthal, who had compared working for Commissioner Stern to slavery on a plantation, admitted after the Council hearing that, "It's true a lot has been done by the Parks Department."