Incoming Worcester City Manager Details Diversity, Equity Plan

WORCESTER, MA — With Worcester city leadership set to change, the job of overseeing diversity and equity in local government will also shift for the third time in as many months.

Deputy City Manager Eric Batista will take over as interim city manager on June 1 with the departure of Ed Augustus. Right now, Batista is also the interim chief diversity officer, a role he took on after Stephanie Williams resigned from the job on March 18.

City council Municipal and Legislative Operations Committee Chair Khrystian King asked Batista to provide details about the succession plan for the chief diversity officer job with Augustus' last day on May 31. Batista told King and councilors George Russell and Sean Rose that he would hire a temporary assistant city manager who would also take on the diversity and equity role. A permanent chief diversity officer will likely come later, he said.

The city is performing racial equity audits of city departments, and Batista said he wants to see the results before hiring for the role. He also said he would hold off on hiring a consultant to assess the city's diversity needs, which At-Large Councilor Thu Nguyen asked Augustus to do in March.

Williams was the third diversity officer in Worcester since 2016, and Nguyen asked for a consultant to figure out why the city was having trouble with retention.

"We will have a rich conversation on the council floor and with community partners before we jump right away to get a consultant," Batista told the committee this week.

Batista said the racial equity audit might be ready for council to review "in the next few weeks," and after that he would make a decision on hiring a consultant or perhaps go straight to hiring a new diversity officer.

Williams' resignation was viewed as a failure of Worcester to make meaningful progress on diversity in city government. The city's Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee suspended its operations after the resignation, and the Worcester NAACP withdrew its role as an institutional member of Worcester’s Tercentenary Committee. In her resignation letter, Williams called diversity efforts in Worcester an "extracurricular activity."

"[T]here are personal boundaries that conflict with the current culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion being an extracurricular activity without embracing all that a properly experienced [chief diversity officer] can do," Williams' letter said.

Batista told councilors that diversity, equity and inclusion would be one of his two top priorities as interim city manager. He also said Worcester had signed a contract with the National League of Cities to train department leaders on diversity. He has also been trying to centralize hiring data in the human resources department, which will help provide better information to report to city council.

"The two things I want to tackle … one is supporting our department's staffing, and two is [diversity, equity and inclusion]. There is no way we will be effective as a city government if we don't do both," he said. "The general public wants accessible government, they want a transparent government and a government that responds at the time they need them. We can't be impactful if our staff is not supported and if our work is not equitable."