Team is still coming together but appears to be as diverse as state

Recently, we stumbled across a blog post that took a look at the diversity of the state's agency heads. The numbers were pretty grim. According to an analysis by Tom Cusack, the former Portland director of housing development for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and later the department's Oregon field office director, all of the directors appeared to be white and only a quarter of them were female.

Cusack's analysis wasn't scientific -- he used photos of the Cabinet officials to guess at their ethnic identity and he surveyed only 24 of the most prominent officials. That said, he wondered whether Gov. John Kitzhaber might have a problem similar to that of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who was criticized for having an all-white Cabinet.

Now, the parallel doesn't exactly hold up. Kitzhaber doesn't really have a Cabinet in the same way that Kasich does. Also, agency heads carry over from administration to administration, and while Kitzhaber asked those leading the biggest agencies to offer their resignations, it would have been unusual for him to drop several. (As it happened, he axed two of them -- one an ethnic minority and one a woman.)

Still, the blog post did remind us of one of Kitzhaber's campaign promises. Back in August 2010, he told Radio Movimiento that he would diversify his administration. Given that he's been in office for two months now, we figured we should take a look at whether he seemed to be making progress on his promise.

We decided to focus, at least for this update, on the officials that he has been responsible for hiring since taking office -- essentially his office staff -- and to hold off on agency heads and other carry-overs until he has been in the position of having to reappoint them for whatever reason.

We spoke to Frank Garcia Jr., the governor's director of diversity and inclusion. Garcia argued it was still too early to evaluate Kitzhaber on this promise -- "There are still some positions within the staff that need to be filled” -- but he agreed to send us a diversity audit of the 37 people employed in the governor"s office as of Feb. 23, 2011.

According to Garcia's count, 58 percent (21 total) of the employees were female, while 22 percent (8 total) were ethnic minorities.

We asked Garcia what standard he thought Kitzhaber should be held to when he told voters that his administration would be a diverse one. Here's what he said:

"I just think it's an attitude, it's an understanding … it's an appreciation and being intentional about Oregon's demographics,” he said. "Diversity inclusion is really to embrace people from different perspectives, religious philosophies, socioeconomic places.

"I don't know what exactly that looks like” in terms of numbers, he added.

That seemed fair, but the Kitz-O-Meter demands a scale. We thought it over and decided that if the governor's office reflected state demographics, that might be a good starting point.

As luck would have, the 2010 Census numbers were just released. According to those figures, in 2010 about 78 percent of Oregonians identified as white while the remaining 22 percent identified as Latino, Asian, African American, Native American or multiracial.

It seems his office does, in fact, mirror the overall diversity of the state. The staff composition, however, is falling short when it comes to Latinos, Oregon's largest minority group. There is only one Latino working in the governor's office, while Latinos make up 12 percent of Oregon's population.

(Out of 37 employees, 21 were women and 16 were men. In terms or race or ethnicity, three were Asian, two were African American, one was Latino, two were Native American and 29 were white.)

Overall, it appears that Kitzhaber is addressing the issue of diversity in terms of the make-up of his staff. We'll continue to revise this promise as we see Kitzhaber make additional appointments, fill the vacancies left by the two dismissed agency heads and appoint permanent directors in place of "acting” agency heads. For now, we'll call this a promise In the Works.