
NEW HANOVER COUNTY — A local leader is taking a page from President Donald Trump’s playbook by looking to cut New Hanover County’s Office of Diversity and Equity.
READ MORE: NHC proposed budget defunds PCU, suggests moving employees to other departments
Commissioner Dane Scalise roped in the county’s DEI department, founded in 2020, in critical remarks he made at the commissioners’ Jan. 21 meeting. In those comments, he said he plans to advocate for gutting the $600,000-department at the commissioners’ budget sessions, the first of which is scheduled for Thursday afternoon.
“I aim to streamline government, not fund ideology,” Scalise said to Port City Daily Tuesday. “My focus has been and will remain on providing excellent core services to all our citizens. DEI is a costly distraction away from that focus.”
Port City Daily requested an interview with Scalise on his effort to remove the department; the commissioner thought his statements on Jan. 21 were sufficient, but said PCD could send him questions to answer.
Scalise was asked why he chose to bring up his objections on the department now instead of earlier in his tenure, if he had gotten any community feedback on dismantling the office, and how he felt about its goals, which include reducing poverty in underserved areas, expanding food access and increasing job opportunities.
The commissioner didn’t answer any of the questions, only provided a statement.
Scalise used two recent documents as a launching pad for his advocacy against DEI; a proclamation in support of National Day of Racial Healing and a letter from the Hispanic-Latino Commission advocating against anti-immigrant rhetoric.
However, Scalise’s move follows President Trump’s directive to end all DEI programs within federal agencies, including the military, as part of his deluge of executive orders issued on his first day in office. Trump called DEI discriminatory and stated opportunities should be offered based on merit, rather than meeting diversity goals. State and local governments can retain their DEI departments, though several state offices have moved to get rid of theirs and the UNC System banned DEI across its campuses last year.
“It is time, as President Trump correctly noted during his inaugural address yesterday, to, quote, ‘end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,’ and we’ll work tirelessly to make that reality at the local level,” Scalise said at the commissioners’ meeting.
The National Day of Racial Healing is a concept founded by the W.K Kellog Foundation, which Scalise pointed out supports the concept of systemic racism — or racism that exists in the framework or policies of institutions like criminal justice, healthcare and employment. Scalise — the lone vote against the proclamation for National Day of Racial Healing — objects to systemic racism’s existence and even said it went against MLK Jr.’s belief system as well.
“King’s dream is directly at odds with systemic racism, CRT [Critical Race Theory] and this proclamation, which in essence, emphasized the permanent and pervasive nature of racial division and government,” Scalise said.
Scalise is not the first lawmaker to mischaracterize the famed civil rights leader’s beliefs. While MLK Jr. does talk of a future, unified America free from racial biases, in his famed “I Have a Dream” speech, in the same speech he spoke about ending policy brutality and sundown towns. He has also written frequently about racism in societal institutions, like in the following from his 1969 essay “A Testament of Hope”:
“Justice for black people will not flow into this society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory … White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.”
Scalise also criticized a letter he said was sent by the county’s DEI office — it was sent by a sub-committee of the department, the Hispanic-Latino Commission — condemning anti-immigrant rhetoric and undue speculation about anyone’s citizenship. The letter did not point to any specific offending statement.
Scalise said he learned upon further queries that the letter was intended to advocate for New Hanover County to move toward “sanctuary county” status, which is a municipality that limits its cooperation with immigration authorities. Though there has been no explicit push to adopt a sanctuary policy in New Hanover County, Scalise said he won’t allow this vision to come true.
Because of these two grievances, Scalise said the county’s DEI department has “amply demonstrated that it should not be funded in this year’s or future budgets.”
The Office of Diversity and Equity, formed in 2020, is overseen by Chief Diversity Officer Linda Thompson, along with four other employees; their salaries make up the most of the budget, while operating expenses are $68,819.
When it was founded, the office had 33 recommendations to the county and as of Jan. 2023, had completed 60% of its goals, including:
- Partnering with community organizations and holding specialized job recruitment events targeted as underserved populations
- Creating a poverty reduction task force
- Providing free Wi-Fi in low-income neighborhoods
- Creating the Race and Social Justice Institute to discuss and mend community race relations
- Helping LINC transform a site into a boarding school for youth
- Partnering with agencies on affordable housing initiatives
Since then, it has launched a food distribution map, showing available reduced price or free meal options for residents. It has also created a language access plan adopted by commissioners to expand the county’s communication into different languages.
Future initiatives, as of January 2023, include a well-water testing campaign for underserved communities potentially affected by PFAS, expanding food access across the county — including by kickstarting the construction of a grocery store on the Northside — and offering more LGBTQ+ partnerships with the county.
PCD asked the county for an update on the office’s goals since January 2023 but did not receive a response by press. Thompson also declined an interview.
The department is responsible for providing training to county employees, which the county noted 95% of employees approve of. Most of the office’s key performance indicators have to do with its training or events; it is currently meeting all but one, which is to provide DEI training to 2,000 New Hanover County residents each year.
The county has improved the diversity within its ranks; as of January 2023, its employees are 73% White, 19% Black and 4.8% Hispanic. This is compared to the county’s overall population demographic, which is 77% white, 12% Black, and 6.4% Hispanic.
Though community impact remains harder to see. Poverty has continued to increase in the county, reaching 11.6% of the population in 2022 to around 12% today; the county’s Black population has also continued its decline, falling from 12.4% in 2020 to 12% currently. This loss was further exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic where the mortality rate for the county’s Black population increased by 7%.
Though Scalise chose not to expand on why the thinks DEI’s actual work is a distraction from core services — as opposed to, say, parks and recreation or the senior resource center — this is not Scalise’s first crusade to cut whole departments from the county’s budget.
Last year, he led the push to defund Port City United, which began in 2022 with the intent to curb violence community-wide. It had three components: a hotline to connect the community with resources, school coaches for children of a lower socioeconomic class, and a mediation and outreach team that hired former gang members or gang-member adjacent people to intervene in violent situations before they erupted into gunplay.
Scalise, along with commissioner LeAnn Pierce, took issue with the last component, especially after two people from the team were arrested for varying crimes. One was mediation and outreach supervisor Stephen Barnett, charged with accessory to attempted murder. The other was Courtney McNeil who faces 16 drug charges and a firearm charge.
Despite pulling the department’s $2.9 million in funding, the county did try to “relocate” current employees to other departments.
The county’s Thursday budget session will be held in the NHC Government Center beginning at 1:30 p.m.
[Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated to state the mortality rate of NHC’s Black population increased by 7%, not 7% of the Black population died due to Covid-19. PCD regrets the error.]
Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.
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