The city of Albany is embarking on a year-long equity audit.
The city will crunch 10 years of data to gauge policies and procedures relating to "equitable access and inclusion, equitable opportunities, and equitable resources to its employees, residents, vendors and contractors."
Deputy Chief City Auditor Peatros Haile says comments, concerns and complaints from city employees, residents, and elected officials prompted auditors to decide to take a closer look.
Haile notes in late 2018 Chief City Auditor Dorcey Applyrs moved to address systemic racism in Albany, leading to the resolution creating a citywide equity agenda.
“And one of the results of this legislation was basically, the city had to produce a report that basically told the common council that every sort of transaction the city's doing is through an equity lens," said Haile. "And, of course, three, four months later, we entered a pandemic. So that report got delayed, but it's still was one of the mayor's priorities, if you look at her administration, equity is a big piece of it.”
An Equity Agenda panel, which acts as an advisory group to improve equity for marginalized groups, is now in place.
Haile says the new audit has seven primary areas of focus:
“One of the areas is hiring rates. We have promotion rates, the demographic makeup of organizational leadership, allocation of city resources and services, the permits and contracts that are given out. Minority and women owned business compliance, and then also ADA compliance. And even though we've brought it down to these seven priority areas, it's a massive scope," Haile said. "So you know, we're going to be upfront with residents and employees, and anyone else that's interested in this audit, we're going to try to be as thorough as possible. But at the end of day, it really depends on the data that we're able to obtain from the different city departments.”
Haile says three activities will anchor the auditing process.
“It's going to be the process of interviewing, data collection, and then the document review. And we don't see really asking for new, sort of reports, or anything like that, because we really want to make sure that we're auditing what already exists," said Haile. "We don't want departments going out of the way to produce something new for us, because that would defeat the purpose of getting an accurate idea of, of what the city has.”
Haile delves into the data demographics to be considered. “For example, when we're looking at promotion rates, we're looking at the age of individuals, we're looking at the sex, we're looking at race and ethnicity, we're looking at disability status, education income," Haile says "We’re really trying to approach it from a comprehensive level. We even debated about looking at religion, we debated looking at sexual orientation. But we decided to leave those two demographic points out, because when you look at the City of Albany, and how it collects its data, those are two data points that they don't have. We did want to consider those two groups because we know those groups also. suffer from inequities.”
Haile says the audit team decided that a 10-year timeframe would ensure a comprehensive understanding of trends.
“Once this audit is completed, we're going to share it with the mayor's office and administrative services. And what we try to do with all of our audits is really, once we collect all the data, look at best practices, so we could come up with feasible, actionable recommendations that will hopefully address some of the issues that we've identified," said Haile. "And at that point, it really, the ball is really in the city's court, in the sense that, if you look at the city charter, our job is really to complete these performance audits, identify best practices to address whatever issues were found. And then it's really on the city of Albany to decide which recommendations they believe they could implement, and which ones could be may be addressed down the road.”
Haile says the audit will benefit the city and everyone in it.
“When we're speaking of hiring rates, promotion rates, obviously that's looking at city employees. But then if you're looking at allocation of city resources and services, that automatically touches all city residents, you know, if you're a resident living in neighborhood A, are your sidewalks, are your roads as well kept as neighborhood B, or if you're a contractor or vendor, with the city, are you seeing that you're having the same opportunity as some of the bigger players, some of the more well-known players to compete and be awarded some of these city contracts," Haile said. "So really, you know, you look at the different priority areas, and the addresses all the different stakeholders. So residents will be interested in the results of this. Employees will be interested in the results. Elected officials, contractors, will be interested in the results of this audit.”
Haile says the audit will be performed in house, and there aren’t concerns about overtime expenses. The most recent city audit examined racial bias in the Albany Police Department. Conducted in 2020 by the Virginia-based consulting firm CNA as ordered by Applyrs, it found differences in the outcome of arrests based on a person’s skin color further fuels community concerns.
