A Human Rights Task Force website launched Monday indicates the City of Charlottesville is a step closer to ultimately creating a human rights commission to address discrimination in the City. City Council appointed an 11-member committee in March to evaluate the potential human rights commission proposed during the City's Dialogue on Race.
The Human Rights Task Force lists a phone number on its website for "individuals who believe they have been subjected to discrimination or prejudicial treatment as a result of age, race, gender, religion or disability," to report their concerns, according to a City press statement released Monday.
During the next 10 months, the task force will collect information through its website, interact with the community through public forums and study human rights commissions across the state before drafting a report for Council which will assess the need for a permanent human rights commission in the City.
"Community members, by sharing their experiences, will help the task force make this determination [of whether the City needs a human rights commission] over the next nine months, and present a recommendation to Council in late 2012," according to the City press statement.
Meanwhile, Charlottesville City Manager Maurice Jones said one of the task force's main objectives is to "serve as a referral service until [the City] deal[s] with the commission down the road."
City Councilwoman Dede Smith said the website would help residents suffering from discrimination by referring them to external agencies which can help them resolve their concerns.
Assoc. Education Prof. Walt Heinecke, a former member of the policy action team which proposed the human rights commission, said he thinks Council is using the task force to stall the creation of a commission. He said he believes political pressure from the Chamber of Commerce is impeding the creation of the City's human rights commission.
"We initially proposed that the human rights commission have the ability to enforce anti-discrimination laws in the City of Charlottesville, and my feeling is that the City Council put the task force together so that they could avoid actually appointing a commission that had the ability to enforce anti-discrimination laws," Heinecke said.
Jones, however, said he did not think the task force formation was intended to slow down the process of ultimately forming a City human rights commission. He said he thought Charlottesville's task force would allow Council to gauge the City's level of discrimination before moving forward.
The biggest cost the task force faces is advertising its new website and phone line, said Charlene Green, program coordinator for the City's Dialogue on Race. She said the funding would be appropriated from the Dialogue on Race's budget.
Charlottesville citizens can call 434-970-3050 to file a discrimination complaint, or they can fill out an incident form online at charlottesville.org/humanrights.
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