Santa Rosa committee expands list of languages on unity sculpture, reversing prior decision

Santa Rosa’s Art in Public Places Committee voted Tuesday to expand the list of languages to appear on a unity sculpture slotted for installation at Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square this summer, reversing its previous decision to limit the list despite objections from the public.

The seven-person arts committee, which on Tuesday included a new member, revisited the list after a procedural error nullified a Jan. 10 vote regarding the words and languages that will appear on Unum, a stainless steel sculpture meant to symbolize unity and celebrate the diversity of Santa Rosa.

On Jan. 10, a 3-1 vote directed Santa Rosa city staff to proceed with a list of 17 languages for the sculpture, 15 of which represent those most commonly spoken in Santa Rosa households and two others that acknowledge the local Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok communities.

The vote went against the majority of public comment submitted and phoned-in during the meeting, which called on committee members to include other languages, such as Hebrew, Japanese and Russian.

Members of Sonoma County’s Jewish and Japanese community implored the committee to revisit the vote after the meeting, saying the decision to limit the list would exclude community groups whose languages were not represented.

Three weeks later, city staff announced that the committee had needed four affirmative votes, not three, to carry the Jan. 10 motion and therefore the item would go to a vote again.

On Tuesday, prior to the unanimous vote, committee member Lisa Puentes said she appreciated the chance to revisit the decision after missing the Jan. 10 meeting.

“I do support my committee members but I did have some concerns with the languages that I felt, from my knowledge at that time, we were missing,” Puentes said. “So, I’m so grateful to have this second opportunity to be here.”

Equity and inclusion was a goal for the community advisory group tapped to help the arts committee select the list of words and languages for the sculpture, both city staff and a committee member who participated in those efforts said on Tuesday.

City staff were asked to develop an equitable criteria for which languages would be included at the request of the volunteer group, which led a staff member to respond with a list of the most commonly spoken languages in Santa Rosa homes based on census data.

The advisory group then used that guide to develop the list that resulted in the Jan. 10 recommendation to the committee of 15 languages plus the two indigenous languages.

It was the volunteer group’s work that several of the committee members present during the Jan. 10 meeting said they wanted to honor.

Jeff Nathanson, a committee member who participated in some of the initial community advisory group meetings, said he was “surprised that (the list) was a smaller list than probably it should have been,” despite the group’s efforts to be inclusive of the community.

Still, he acknowledged the difficulty of the advisory’s group task during Tuesday’s meeting.

“This was a really difficult thing to do,” Nathanson said. “On the surface, it was ‘let’s look out and see who lives in Santa Rosa, what languages are spoken, there’s that data that exists’ but it didn’t produce the results exactly how we thought it would.”

Judy Kennedy, a community member who spoke during public comment, shared her glee over the proposal to expand the list of languages to be more inclusive. She also said she was excited by the public interest generated over the sculpture.

“It’s not ‘I like it’ and ‘I don’t like it,’ it’s people with really imaginative ideas and interesting takes on the process and sculpture itself,” Kennedy said.

The full list of languages to be included in Unum: English, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Ilocano/ Samoan/Hawaiian, Vietnamese, Thai, Khmer, Amharic/Somali, French, Swahili, German, Korean, Italian, Persian/ Farsi/ Dari, Cambodian, Tigrinya, Laotian, Hmong, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Hindi, Hungarian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Gujarati, Swedish, Polish, Miwok and Southern Pomo.

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @nashellytweets.