The Enfield Town Council voted on Tuesday night to disband the town’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee that was formed in 2022 after an alleged racist incident in town.
The Enfield Town Council voted on Tuesday night to disband the town’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee that was formed in 2022 after an alleged racist incident in town.
“It was a dead-end initiative right from the get-go,” Mayor Ken Nelson (R-Enfield) said. “As far as us dissolving the DEI committee – we didn’t. The DEI committee dissolved itself when they imploded from within, without coming to us asking for help.”
Nelson said the committee struggled to get its footing early on and imploded.
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“There’s no secret I was not in favor of it from the beginning. I believe that people should move up the ladder by hard work and a commitment, not because of a gender or skin color,” Nelson said. “They formed a committee, they put the members on it, and the first meeting happened, an organizational meeting, and that was the last meeting that several of the members attended. Two and a half years later, we’re here today.”
Before being dissolved, the committee had just three members and six vacant seats, according to the town’s website. Their last meeting was in September, and their November meeting was canceled.
“We gave them a charge as the town to look at different things, bring suggestions to the town council,” the mayor explained. “And they never came to the town – not once. Even with four total members, there wasn’t a quorum.”
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Town councilors discussed the issue on Tuesday before voting to repeal the resolution that created the committee a little over two years ago.
“People have applied, and those applications have been put to the side because this is the ultimate goal is to disband this committee,” councilwoman Gina Cekala said.
Former town councilman Nick Hopkins, a Democrat, said the decision is frustrating. He helped form the committee.
“It's incredibly frustrating. A lot of time and energy, multiple community stakeholders went into building this very thoughtfully, and to have it just kind of thrown out with the garbage is very frustrating. I think it's, you know, the result of a just a wholesale rejection of the principles of DEI and the idea that maybe we should talk about complicated matters because they have a real benefit to our community,” Hopkins said.
He said the committee was a place for people to have difficult conversations and make the town a better place.
“A lot of the people in local government are older, white, wealthier. But there are a lot of people who live in Enfield due to its proximity to Hartford, to Springfield, to New York and its lower cost of living that are not white and older and wealthy, and they feel like they're kind of shut out. This was a sort of an attempt to give them a platform,” Hopkins continued. “I think it was doing good work up until the point the Republicans took over and then it could not really do anything with its hands tied, not allowing enough members to be to have a quorum to even have the meetings.”
Rosalind Swift, a member of the now-defunct committee, said in a statement: “DEI is a complex and challenging set of issues to address, and given the current national climate, discussions around diversity, equity, and inclusion have become even more difficult. I was disappointed that we were not given enough time to adequately work on such an important and difficult task. However, I remain hopeful and committed to having a much-needed community conversation around these critical topics in the future."
John Malinoski, another member of the committee, said in a phone call with NBC Connecticut that it was “very unfortunate that they made that decision because there’s work that needs to be done in the town and this was a potential mechanism to make some needed change.”
He said while the committee had problems getting started, he doesn’t think there was a reason to completely eliminate it. He said he would have preferred to see it strengthened.
