The Equal Opportunities Commission Executive Committee planned their next steps in allowing more voices to be heard in city politics Monday night.
The committee wants to amend a Madison General Ordinance clause that currently requires U.S. citizenship for volunteer members of boards, commissions and committees. Federal labor laws require U.S. citizenship for paid employees, but the City Attorney's office was unable to find a statutory requirement for volunteers.
'There are a lot of people that have been here for years. Why do they have to be second-class or no-class citizens of Madison? Everybody should be first class,' EOC Executive Committee member Bert Zipperer said.
The mayor can waive the citizenship clause for specific volunteers, but the committee fears the clause will scare away applicants.
'It's more likely that when they go through the application, and it says citizenship on it, they just wouldn't turn it in,' Zipperer said. 'Do we really want to exclude those people from the public dialogue in the city'?
The EOC Executive Committee is also concerned about the accessibility of city meetings for foreign language speakers, physically handicapped individuals and deaf individuals.
A recent census indicated Spanish, Hmong and Russian as the three most common languages in Madison other than English, according to EOC Executive Committee member Michael Howe.
Groups are required to provide interested individuals with interpreters. State law requires committees to publish their agenda 24 hours in advance to notify foreign language speakers. Twenty-four hours is insufficient notice for groups to contact sign language and foreign language interpreters, according to EOC Executive Assistant Cindy Wick. The EOC Executive Committee would like agendas to be published earlier than the state minimum.
'These are the languages most likely to be needed. Let's accommodate them because that's the right thing to do,' Howe said.
Agendas are published using the 'legistar' system, which cannot accommodate the Russian alphabet. The EOC Executive Committee would like to include Russian, Spanish and Hmong translations of contact information notifying individuals needing interpreters. They hope that all groups will post this information at the top of their agenda. Only a handful of groups have volunteered to post this information, Wick said.
'We started looking at this because we wanted to encourage participation from people from other cultures at our meetings, so we decided to start putting this language at the top of our agenda,' Wick said.
