Diversity Is Mixed In County Offices

Women, Minorities Lag in Some Areas

As immigration and demographic shifts have transformed Montgomery County in recent years, its government workforce has become more diverse in nearly equal measure, according to a county report.

The analysis shows that minorities accounted for 28 percent of the government workforce in 1990, when they made up 27 percent of the population, and for 38 percent of the workforce in 2003, when they made up 39 percent of the population.

Minorities and women, however, remain disproportionately underrepresented in the Fire and Rescue Service and, despite significant gains, in supervisory positions throughout the government, the report by the Office of Legislative Oversight found.

"We're doing a lot of the right things, and I think it's just a question of staying focused on it," said County Council member Duchy Trachtenberg (D-At Large), chair of the council's Management and Fiscal Policy Committee, which recently had a hearing on the report. "There are certainly improvements that have been made."

The Fire and Rescue Service has drawn criticism for failing to keep pace with the changing county. In 2004, for example, when whites accounted for 60 percent of the county population, 43 of 46 members of a service recruitment class were white.

The report, accepted by the County Council at its meeting Tuesday, found that in 2005, women accounted for 13 percent of Fire and Rescue Service employees, one percentage point less than in 2000. Over the same period, minority representation in the service climbed slightly, from 21 to 23 percent.

According to the report, the service spent $1.9 million on recruitment efforts in fiscal 2005 and 2006 combined.

County Council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville), chair of the council's Public Safety Committee, described the service's efforts to recruit a diverse force as diligent and vigorous.

"There's certainly room for improvement in the results," Andrews said. "I think the effort the department has made has been significant, and I know that [Chief Thomas W. Carr Jr.] is working hard to achieve a diverse force that is highly qualified. I think we're on the right track."

Among the Fire and Rescue Service's outreach strategies is a plan to introduce a fire safety curriculum in a cluster of county public schools where minorities predominate in the student population. The curriculum, planned to be in place in fall 2008, is intended to encourage students to consider careers in such areas as public safety code enforcement and arson investigation.

The report showed that among supervisory positions, minorities and women made large gains in recent years but continued to hold those jobs in lower numbers than would be expected given their prevalence in the county's workforce.

There were 282 minorities in supervisory jobs in 2005, 106 more than five years earlier. Even so, while minorities made up 39 percent of the workforce in 2005, they accounted for 27 percent of supervisors.

Similarly, there were 323 women in supervisory positions in 2005, up from 254 five years earlier. But although women made up 44 percent of the overall workforce in 2005, they held 31 percent of the county's supervisory jobs that year.

The county had 8,429 employees by the end of 2005.

Trachtenberg said the county government is soon to release a comprehensive plan on workforce diversity. The plan will be the first to rely on data from the 2000 Census rather than the 1990 Census.

"We're anxiously awaiting that, because that's also going to give us a sense of what steps we can take to further improve the recruitment practices here in the county," she said.