In this episode host Stephen Goldsmith interviews Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards, exploring her strategies for embedding equity into every aspect of municipal operations. Mayor Woodards explains how to use data, mapping, and community engagement to not just talk about equity but actively implement it.
In this episode host Stephen Goldsmith interviews Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards, exploring her strategies for embedding equity into every aspect of municipal operations. Mayor Woodards explains how to use data, mapping, and community engagement to not just talk about equity but actively implement it. She also highlights the Tacoma Equity Index, which is a pivotal tool for identifying and addressing disparities across neighborhoods.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
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Betsy Gardner:
This is Betsy Gardner, editor at Data Smart City Solutions at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. And you're listening to the Data-Smart City Pod where we bring on top innovators and experts to discuss the future of cities and how to become data smart.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Hello, this is Stephen Goldsmith, professor of the practice of urban policy at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard. Today we have a very important guest for today's episode. Tacoma, Mayor Victoria Woodwards, Mayor Woodwards has been head of her city since 2018.
And during her tenure she focuses on issues around equity, affordable housing, public engagement and trust and she is former president of the National League of Cities – so she's found time to be president of the National League of Cities. So welcome Mayor Woodward.
Mayor Woodards:
Thank you so much Steven and thank you for having me here today. Honored to join you.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Our pleasure. So, give our listeners a minute or two about your background before you became mayor, so that we can use that as a context for your initiatives.
Mayor Woodards:
So, I am proud to have called Tacoma my home since the age of three. So, it is the only community I know I graduated from high school there, joined the military, spent some time in corporate America and in the nonprofit world and then went to work in government where I first worked for a local elected leader, and I was his policy analyst. Then I spent five years on the Metropolitan Parks Board, which is an elected body in my city, later ran for City Council, spent seven years on the City Council. And now I'm proud to serve as mayor of my hometown Tacoma, Washington.
Stephen Goldsmith:
That's quite a path, a career in public service. Congratulations for that. Mayor we were attracted to you and your city because of your leadership and because we pay a lot of attention to the use of data in everything but including in equity and we saw the great work of the Tacoma Equity Index.
But before we get there, what's the role of the mayor as a leader for equity. I want to get to the Chief Equity Officer and data in a second. But how do you view your role in this regard?
Mayor Woodards:
Well, let me just give you just a little bit of context in the city of Tacoma, we have what's called a city management form of government. So, we have a day-to-day Chief Executive Officer who runs the day-to-day operations of the city. So for me as mayor, there are a couple of things, there are a couple of ways I view my role. Number one is to be a champion, to use the bully pulpit of the mayor's office to be relentless in what issues that I deem are very important to me and my community.
And one of those issues absolutely is equity. I think another way - and we'll talk about it as we move on today - but another way is to make sure that we are embedding equity in everything that we do within the city, so that we're making policy that really focuses on making sure that equity is a part of every policy we pass. And so that's kind of how I view my role at a very high level. But once you make a policy, then it really is what people, you know, policy are the standards which our organization operates on every day.
They're the rules, everyone follows. So once it becomes policy, then everybody else has to carry out those policies. So, I see that as just two very important roles where you actually get to make sure that equity isn't just something that we say, it's something that we actually do.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I'm interested in how you structure that and organize it in your government. Maybe before we get there, talk to us a little bit about the Tacoma Equity Index, which I believe is the Index you use for kind of evaluation policy decisions. What is that Index exactly?
Mayor Woodards:
So, the Equity Index was created to be able to look at different neighborhoods in our city to find out where inequities exist, and we call them low opportunity areas versus high opportunity areas. And the index was created using 17 different data points. We actually use data from the Census Bureau. We use the data from the Census Bureau and data of our own to really help us dig deeper. Now, obviously, we can look around and see things have changed, but it really allows us to even look at the things that we can't see.
So, the Equity Index allows us to put in the street, a neighborhood, a census track, a district and be able to evaluate that neighborhood based on the rest of the city and be able to see where the deficits are in that neighborhood or what's needed in that neighborhood to get them exactly what they need to be successful.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So let me differentiate in my next couple questions between an activity, a sidewalk or a streetlight, and comprehensive neighborhood development in a low opportunity area. Let's start with the former. When we talked earlier, I thought your example about streetlights and equity was particularly compelling because one of the challenges here is how we think about equity across agencies and across occurrences. So maybe just talk a little bit in terms of the transactional side, the street light example that you gave us earlier.
Mayor Woodards:
But I think it used to be when we fix the streetlight in the city, we fixed the streetlight in the city based on the complaint that we got. So, if we had budget to fix 100 streetlights in the city for the year, and we got 100 calls, and all those calls came from a high opportunity area…those were the streetlights that we went to fix. What we know in some of our lower opportunity areas is that people know the street light is out when their son or daughter walks, you know, from one neighbor's house to the other or walks home or from the community park or from school, sometimes in those neighborhoods, families don't even know how to access local government.
Or they don't have time to think about that. They're busy just trying to, you know, get their kids off to school, get their homework done, get ready for work the next day, get their kids out to school, you know, go to work. And so, there's a different focus. What the Equity Index allows us to do is to look and see what lights are out in our city. And if we can only fix 100 make sure we're fixing those 100 in the areas of our neighborhood, in the areas of our city, that need those lights the most.
It doesn't just rely on someone externally to the city to make the call. We can depend on our own internal resources and on our own internal staff to make sure that we are equitably fixing those lights across the city. So, it takes - in my opinion - it takes a little bit of the burden off of the community to figure it out and puts the burden on city government to fix it, where I believe it belongs.
We use the Equity Index for almost everything we do, in all of our policies now that come forward much like in many cities and in many state and federal governments, there's this thing called a fiscal note, right? You have to explain what the cost of implementing this policy means or does; we now use it in the same way that there's an equity footnote. And we have to look at equity in the city to establish how does this policy, how will this policy affect our Equity Index and how we are becoming this anti-racist city? How are we making investments that really focus on those who need it the most?
Stephen Goldsmith:
So let me see if I can make this a little more difficult for you. So, let's assume that if you looked at a neighborhood that has stressed, you could say, ‘well, it's inequitable, put more housing in or it's inequitable, we put a park in.’ But then if you step back, you say, ‘well, that neighborhood may need all of the above,’ right? It needs social infrastructure, physical infrastructure, housing. So how do you ensure that in those place-based equity conversations that the right people are at the table and the right decisions are made?
Mayor Woodards:
Well, you know, we take community engagement very seriously. So much so that we actually have someone on staff whose title is Community Engagement Coordinator. We also recently added to the city is a Language Outreach Coordinator. So, it's not just about reaching out to people, it's about reaching out to people in a language or in a way that they understand. And so, I think what's really important for us is that when we're making those decisions that we are engaging the community which we're making the investment in. And we take that work very seriously and I'll give you just a perfect example.
We just launched a couple of participatory budgeting exercises in our city. Each one of our districts within the next couple of years is going to get a million dollars to spend in their district. And the community itself gets to decide how that money is spent. We use both our Equity Index, our Community Engagement Coordinator, and our Language Outreach Coordinator to help us bring community to the table to talk about what might happen. I am proud to say that when they sent out their survey using our Equity Index and those two people, we received over 12,000 responses to how we're going to spend those million dollars. And in that community, that is more than the number of people from that district that voted in the last election.
So, what that tells me is that we are doing the right thing and working really hard to engage the community in which we're going to make these investments because nobody knows better. We can look and say, ‘OK, there are no parks in this district, there's not enough housing in this district, there are not enough grocery stores in this district,’ right? But when you get down and you talk to neighbors and go, ‘you all don't have a grocery store,’ some may say ‘we don't need the traditional grocery store because we're lucky enough that we have, we may have an Asian market, or we have a Hispanic market’ right? So, they have other things. What we see is some traditional things, community may have answers to those in other ways. And if you only have a certain amount of land to do something, the question is to the community, ‘what's most important to you?’ And I think that speaks to your question, Steven, how do we engage and how do we make sure that we're talking to the people who will be affected by every decision that we make.
Stephen Goldsmith:
You're in an interesting place because you are a well-known mayor and you are well known on this issue, and you have one of the country's preeminent Chief Equity Officers, but she can't be at every meeting, right? How do you make sure the agencies pay attention to equity? Of course, you have the Index, and you have your impact statements, but where does she appear? How does she use her influence across the city? The enterprise?
Mayor Woodards:
Well, I think just continually updating and forming, working with department still. Now, the other thing we've done is not only is there an equity footnote, but departments actually have to have a racial equity action plan and so being able to work with departments to help them develop that plan. Because you can say “equity” and some people don't understand what that means or I'm sure when we first started in Public Works, I'm like, ‘well, how does this work in Public Works?’ Right, because we don't always see equity working in every department. When we say equity, people think about jobs, right? They think about jobs when we say equity, people don't normally think about sidewalks and streetlights as we talked about earlier.
So, I think when we put it into the analysis of every budget proposal when it's embedded, when there's a racial equity plan action plan embedded within the department, then our Chief Equity Officer really gets to spend time helping departments carry out that work and answering questions and supporting that, supporting that work. And I think that's the best way. And I think what we get now, which is really important, is that we don't just have one equity expert within the city of Tacoma; we have experts that lie within every department.
And to me that's where you get real success. And that's where it isn't an afterthought. Like, ‘oh, I forgot to look at the racial equity plan or I forgot to send this through,’ you know, our Equity Index, it becomes just a part of how the department does business just like that fiscal note that's been around for centuries. And so, I think her role is really to make sure that it's embedded so deeply within the city that it isn't up to one person, it isn't up to just me as mayor or her as the Chief Equity Officer. It's everyone in the city who carries this work out every day.
Stephen Goldsmith:
How do you use maps, visualization, story maps to tell the story to create more support for your initiatives in this regard? What's the role of kind of visualizing the situation?
Mayor Woodards:
You know, it's very interesting because sometimes if people can't see it, they don't believe it. Even when we could talk about something as old but as impactful as redlining, right? And I think I mentioned some of this earlier, when people can see lines drawn and can understand what that means, then again it allows people to not just understand it anecdotally but to see it. And so, the visual piece combined with the overlay of the data, then people can actually really see and understand what's happening in a community. We make sure that we use those maps when talking to our community and to staff. So, when they go, ‘I don't understand what you mean, we fix potholes all over the city.” Yes, but if in a particular neighborhood, the first street they got 50 years ago wasn't the highest quality of cement or of pavement or you know, whatever the material is, so they get potholes more often, then that's the neighborhood who needs more, who needs more investment, who needs better roads. Because what they got in the first place wasn't the same as what a more affluent neighborhood got. And I really think it's showing, it’s visualizing that, and having people see that sometimes makes the light bulb go off and makes more sense.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I’ve just got one or two more questions for you and maybe this one is unfair, I'm not sure. But if you were to say to your peers who are interested in equity, place-based equity, so comprehensive redevelopment in a community that has been neglected for way too long, maybe starting with the redlining and bringing it forward…how would you structure that inside government? How would you make sure that it's comprehensive and its equity-oriented?
Mayor Woodards:
First thing I would say is that if you're serious about implementing equity within your city or department or business or where you're looking, number one, you can't bury it somewhere within the organization because then it becomes a “want to” and not a “have to.” So the first thing I truly recommend is making sure that wherever you begin to place your Office of Equity or however you begin to think about equity that, it is side by side or reporting directly to your city manager, the mayor, your chief administrative officer, the CEO, whatever the position is.
The number one, it's got to be high enough within the organization because it is a change. And we know that when people have been doing a certain job the same way for a very long time…change is sometimes more difficult and equity is hard because people see, again, “equity” as being “equal” and that's not what equity means. Equity means giving everyone what they need to be successful. And that doesn't mean equally. That means that some people may need a little bit more of something else in order for it to be equitable. But what I will say is that the benefits of equity, if you can give the tools and the support to those who need it the most, everyone benefits.
And my example for that always is when the ADA started to require curb cutouts for those who are disabled, when curb cutouts started to go into neighborhoods, they didn't just benefit those who were disabled. They benefited moms and dads with strollers. They benefited seniors who walked in neighborhoods. They benefited those who exercise, they benefited runners, right? They made it safer. And so again, when you give those who need it the most the tools they need to be successful, then at the end of the day everyone in the community or everyone in the city can benefit from those tools.
I think the one thing, you know, as I think about the fact that everybody benefits, it's true that strong communities grow. In order for communities to flourish, they grow and become stronger when every resident has the opportunity to succeed and make their living and be successful in the community that they call home. And so, it harkens back to ‘we want everyone to be successful.’ And if you do things equitably, that's the way that you get to that.
Stephen Goldsmith:
This is Steve Goldsmith, Professor at the Bloomberg Center at Harvard with a terrific guest, Mayor Woodards from Tacoma. Mayor, thank you so much for your leadership on this issue and for your leadership among mayors generally, it was a pleasure to have you today.
Mayor Woodards:
Good to be here with you, Steven. Thank you so much for having me and look forward to talking to you all again someday soon.
Betsy Gardner:
If you liked this podcast, please visit us at datasmartcities.org, find us on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was hosted by Stephen Goldsmith and produced by me, Betsy Gardner. Thanks for listening.