Taveras: No Minority Appointments So Far

Taveras: No Minority Appointments So Far

He will be Providence’s first Hispanic mayor yet Angel Taveras so far has not made any minority appointments to his administration.

Of the four major appointments he has made, three are white males and one is a white woman.

Several local Latino and other minority leaders told GoLocalProv that it was still early in the process—suggesting it was too early to pass judgment on the diversity of the Taveras administration.

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Cicilline’s first picks were minorities

However, when his predecessor David Cicilline was in the mid-December phase of his transition in 2002 he had named two women to the first two top positions he filled—Carol Grant as director of operations and Carolyn Benedict-Drew as his policy chief. His third appointment was a Hispanic—Gonzalo Cuervo, who was hired as public information officer, according to the 2007 book, A Decade of Rhode Island Latino Political Empowerment, by Tomas Alberto Avila.

Taveras has eliminated the position of director of operations, merging it with the director of administration. His pick for that post: Michael D’Amico. His other three appointments are also Caucasian. They are, in order of announcement: Steven Pare as public safety commissioner, J.R. Pagliarini as chief of staff, and Melissa Withers as communications director. These are four of the major positions in city government in a city that is majority minority by population.

Political scientist Tony Affigne, who teaches at Providence College, said the public won’t know for sure how Taveras compares with Cicilline on diversity until next month. “It’s too soon to tell. I expect the Taveras administration will take diversity seriously,” Affigne said. “But we’ll have to wait until January to know whether his approach is better than or the same as Cicilline’s.”

Minority leaders defend Taveras

As mayor, Taveras will be the chief executive in a city in which minorities are in the majority and ten neighborhoods in the city are more than 60 percent minority, according to ProvPlan, a nonprofit city organization. The 2000 Census puts the number of Hispanics at 30 percent and the number of African-Americans at 14.5 percent.

Two minority leaders defended Taveras, expressing confidence that his administration would be a diverse one. “I’m sure that he is working hard to find a talented and diverse group of people to help him run the city and among that group I’m sure there will be Latinos and African-Americans,” said City Councilman Luis Aponte.

State Rep. Joseph Almeida said Taveras had been holding weekly meetings with leaders of the African-American community in Providence. “I think he’ll be OK with the black community because I think at some point he’ll fill those positions that are open for black leaders,” Almeida said.

Taveras ‘commitment to diversity … will undoubtedly continue’

Asked why his first four appointments were all Caucasian, spokeswoman Arianne Lynch issued this statement to GoLocalProv: “Throughout his campaign and into the transition, Mayor-elect Taveras has displayed a strong commitment to diversity—that will undoubtedly continue.”

In terms of transition staff, Taveras certainly has more diversity than he does in his appointments. Of the four paid transition staffers, two are Caucasian men, two are women, and one of the women is Latino, according to Lynch. Cicilline had ten people on his transition team, five of whom were women, according to A Decade of Rhode Island Latino Political Empowerment.