I had a letter published in the Carmel Pine Cone, June 23-29, 2023 and, as far as I can tell, the editor didn’t change a word.
Quick background: There’s a DEI Task Force in my city of Pacific Grove, California and instead of doing their job, they are trying to persuade the city council to spend over $360,000 on a consultant to do it for them. To put that in perspective, the proposed annual operating budget of the 15,000 person city for 2023-24 is about $28.7 million. So this one expenditure alone would be over 1% of the annual budget.
Here’s the letter I wrote:
In his excellent report “Residents skeptical of pricey DEI consultant for P.G.,” Kelly Nix writes that the Pacific Grove DEI Task Force wants to pay Seed, a southern California consulting firm, over $356,000 to devise a plan to make Pacific Grove “more equitable and inclusive.” He also notes that Seed did a similar assessment for Dublin, California in 2001. Seed recommended that Dublin’s boards and commissions ask applicants to “disclose their race, gender, and income levels.”
It’s very hard to categorize race in a country where there is so much intermarriage. You need to make fine distinctions. But here’s an idea. Maybe the DEI Task Force could investigate how South Africa’s Apartheid government discriminated among various races.
