After announcing some new appointments to various boards and commissions, Sumter County Council members talked about diverse representation among county leaders.
"We have a policy that we adopted back in 2006 or 2007 that we were gonna make sure that our boards and commissions represent the population we serve in race and gender," councilman Eugene Baten of District 7 said during the Dec. 20 special called meeting of Sumter County Council.
Recent appointments to some county commissions and boards have not represented, in race and gender, the populations they serve, according to Baten, and the policy to help county leaders be more representative of the populations they serve was created in response to a 2005 survey conducted by The Sumter Item.
What that survey found was, at the time, white males were represented on boards and commissions at about double what their numbers are in the general county population.
"I'm not opposed to the appointments that was made, but in the future appointments, we need to stick to our policy," Baten said during the recent meeting.
According to Chairman James T. McCain Jr. of District 6, the lack of representation in recent appointments was simply a result of a lack in diverse applicants.
"In order for the appointments to be made, there have to be applications filled out by the citizens and sent in to us or to [Clerk to Council Mary W. Blanding] so that they can then be presented to the chairman of the committee, so if there are no Blacks that are filling out the forms and sending them in to either us or Ms. Blanding, then we have no choice but to appoint the people that fill them out," McCain said. "It is incumbent upon County Council that if we want to get back to the policy that Mr. Baten is talking about, then we need to search out the minorities that are willing to serve on boards and commissions and get information in."
The county's code of ordinances does not list any qualifications locals must meet in order to serve on county boards and commissions, but the application to serve, which can be found on the county's website along with a list of all boards and commissions, does ask applicants to write about any professional history that could help qualify them for the position.
The application also asks the applicant to list their race and gender.
The City of Sumter's code of ordinances, however, says that applicants to boards and commissions must be residents of the city (though it does note exceptions) and applicants cannot be immediate family members of council members.
The most recent Census data shows that Sumter County's population is 47.9% Black, 47.7% White, 4.5% Hispanic or Latino, 1.4% Asian and less than 1% of the county's population is representative of American Indian, Alaska Native, Hawaiian and Pacific Islander.
Census data also shows that 51.7% of Sumter County residents are female.
"I'm not trying to make this a racial issue," Baten said. "I'm trying to make sure that the citizens of this county realize that they can serve on boards and commissions, which for many years, they didn't believe they could."
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