Hispanic Business Community Engages With City Leaders

The City of Dalton is home to a growing and thriving community of Hispanic-owned businesses. Leaders from the Hispanic business community met on Thursday morning with officials form the City of Dalton to discuss new ways to create engagement with local government.

“This is an initiative to engage the Hispanic community and also to allow them to serve as an advisory group to the city,” said City Administrator Andrew Parker.  “Since the city’s population is close to 50% Hispanic now... we wanted to create an actionable step to engage the Hispanic community so that we’ve got real-time feedback from them on issues they need to have a stake in.”

Between 40 and 50 Hispanic business leaders attended the meeting in the City Council Chambers at Dalton’s City Hall. The group was welcomed by Dalton Mayor David Pennington after everyone in the meeting introduced themselves. After opening remarks from Mayor Pennington and Zab Mendez, a local banker who also helped coordinate the meeting, Andrew Parker led a brief presentation on the structure of city government with an emphasis on the different boards and commissions where the leaders present could get involved.

“In Dalton, [being involved] is so important because the Latinos are 50 percent of this city, and probably close to 40 percent of the county. They’re [close to] 75 percent of the city’s school system and when I go to city school board meetings I see almost no Latino representation either from the leadership or in the audience or anything else,” Mayor Pennington told the group while giving his remarks. “That’s why it’s so important because whatever Dalton’s future is, will be determined by all of us, not by half of us."

"The main thing is really bridging that gap and having a solid foundation for the things that are to come," said Zab Mendez. "Mainly that’s communication, making sure we’ve got that clear path of communication to people like Andrew [Parker] and Mayor Pennington and just making sure that our Hispanic business community understands that we are one community and that there are people here who want to see them be successful."

Business leaders taking part in the meeting expressed enthusiasm for doing more to lead the way for greater engagement from their community with local government. Thursday’s meeting was a kickoff meeting with the goal of meeting again on a monthly basis.

“The takeaway from today’s kickoff meeting was that we want to start a monthly meeting and it’s possible that this could become a formal advisory group that’s maybe 8-10 people out of the group that was there today that would meet monthly and potentially become an official committee of the City just like the Public Safety Commission or the Water, Light, Sinking Fund Board,” Parker said. “It would be an Hispanic advisory commission to the Mayor and Council related to projects and ongoing initiatives in the City.

“[The advisory commission would also be] part of our planning efforts when we’re looking at allocating funding, projects within the community, any type of issue they would help advise us on.”

"Engagement – that’s one area where we’re lacking," said Mendez. "I believe this is an opportunity where... people see that we’re here for you and it’s an opportunity for them to get engaged and be on some of these committees where we need to hear their voice as well."

“This is the last time I want to talk about it being two separate populations here because we’re really one population,” Mayor Pennington told the group, saying it was time for the Hispanic owned business community and other business leaders in Dalton to grow together.

“We’re just really excited about the opportunity and the participation today,” Parker said. “We had leaders in the community and we got some great feedback from them today to be able to set a plan for moving forward. I’m very optimistic about this.”