How Newport City Hall is responding to make services more accessible to Spanish speakers

NEWPORT ― Newport’s official language access plan, which the City Council first called for in a February 2021 resolution, will start to roll out alongside the city’s new two-tier tax program at the onset of the new year.

That February 2021 resolution called on City Administrator Joseph J. Nicholson Jr. “to work with staff and community members to establish a Language Access Plan for the City of Newport, to purchase necessary tools to accomplish the translation of documents into Spanish and other languages needed to meet the demands of the populations we serve, and explore the means and cost and make a recommendation before the budget is finalized, by May 2021.”

City Communications Officer Thomas Shevlin, who worked with staff and community members to establish a language access plan for the city of Newport and personally wrote much of the finalized plan which was submitted to and approved by the Council in April 2022, told The Daily News a letter sent out to Newport residents this week informing them of the new two-tier tax system was actually the first bilingual (English and Spanish) document the city has produced as part of its new approach to making city communications, documents and services more multilingual and more accessible to what the federal government terms Low English Proficiency (LEP) individuals and communities.

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He also pointed out the city had previously added a conversational Spanish translation to its website, which users can access by clicking on a drop-down box at the top of their browsers, and stated the city would be rolling out a new English and Spanish-language Citizen’s Participation Guide alongside an updated LEP form database at the beginning of the new year, with the Clerk’s Office working to add Spanish translations to some of the most popular forms and applications used at City Hall.

“Going forward, as we develop programs such as this, our goal will be to incorporate baseline LEP practices into the process from the ground up and hopefully add to them whenever needed,” Shevlin wrote in an email to The Daily News.

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“This is something that I have been advocating for…for about 27 years of my 30 years in Newport. Being on the council the previous two years, I really wanted to see how we could put this forward and also get city hall to be on board with helping mainly our Spanish-speaking residents of Newport because that’s where we’re seeing the difficulties,” former City Councilor Elizabeth Fuerte, who sponsored the initial resolution calling for a language access plan in 2021, said.

She praised Shevlin’s individual effort in putting the plan together but said she didn’t believe the full machinery of the municipality beyond its communications officer was “100% on board” yet, saying, “You can develop a plan, but the plan is only as good as it is executed.”

She stressed the need to add more detail, “the who, what, where, and when can folks get help as they come in,” as well as the need to incorporate the police department, fire department and emergency rescue into the language access plan.

Fuerte also praised the school department, saying, “I could score them E for excellent, for effort. They’ve hired bilingual staff, and they’ve hired interpreters and placed them strategically within the school system.”

Focusing on city hall services for now, pending future budget cycles

While it is noteworthy that the police and fire departments were not involved in the development of the language access plan given the frequency and nature of their interactions with the public, both Shevlin and Rebekah Rosen-Gomez, the executive director of Conexión Latina Newport, expressed their desire to focus first on people’s routine daily interactions at city hall.

Rosen-Gomez said many of the Hispanic community members served by Conexión Latina have been frustrated by language obstacles in the past when trying to complete basic tasks at city hall including filling out or obtaining marriage certificates, bulky waste collection stickers, parking stickers and beach passes.

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She mentioned her organization sometimes fields complaints about members of the Hispanic community leaving bulky waste like old couches on the sidewalk, and pointed out that many non-English speakers are completely unaware of the sticker system, and some of those who are aware have had difficulty finding somebody to help them when they went to city hall to get a sticker.

“We knew from our work with the community that when they needed to go get services at city hall, it was a challenge,” said Rosen-Gomez. “Applications weren’t in their language, there weren’t people who could give them information in their language.”

“I think (the plan) is a huge step in the right direction if it’s implemented,” she told The Daily News. “If it’s written and sitting on a shelf somewhere it’s not useful.”

Shevlin used almost identical language, telling The Daily News the plan “was not meant to sit on a shelf and gather dust” and stating his belief that one of the most important elements of the plan is to review it every two years, in step with the annual budget review process, in order to ensure resources get allocated to the plan’s unrealized elements.

How many non-English speaking residents live in Newport?

The answer to that seems to depend on what data set is used to characterize Newport’s linguistic composition.

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Newport’s language access plan cites 2020 Census data in accounting for a year-round population of over 25,000 residents, with roughly 4.8% of the population – just under 1,200 individuals – over the age of 18 identifying as LEP.

That 4.8% is further broken down as follows: 2.7% LEP Spanish speaking (Approx. 662 adults), 1.3% European non-Spanish speaking (Approx. 302 adults) and 0.8% of LEP Asian/PI speaking (Approx. 102 adults).

Data from the school district and a local organization reveal a greater need for language access in Newport

However, the plan also points to enrollment data from Newport’s public school district as evidence of the city’s steadily increasing population of non-English speakers – some of whom are likely not captured by census data for various reasons including language barriers and residency status. Newport public schools enrolled less than 70 English learners in the 2012-13 academic year, but that number climbed to 323 in 2020-21.

Rosen-Gomez estimates there are between 4,000 and 5,000 Spanish-speaking residents of Newport, but pointed out Low English Proficiency is not a classification to be applied to Newport’s Hispanic community en masse; while there is certainly a large LEP population in need of better Spanish language access services, there are also plenty of people who are perfectly fluent in English or living somewhere on a spectrum of bilingual ability.

She explained in addition to longstanding Dominican and Puerto Rican communities concentrated mainly in the North End, many people came to Newport from El Salvador starting in the 1980s, and for the past 10 years, most of Newport’s new Spanish-speaking residents have been arriving from Guatemala. According to Ronilee Mooney, the Newport public school district’s director of English language learners, some of these new arrivals from Guatemala speak only their native indigenous language of K’iche’ and are not fluent in English or Spanish.

Conexión Latina Newport recently administered a community needs survey in Newport’s Hispanic community, and Roger Williams University’s Latino Policy Institute is currently aggregating the data into a report which will be used to shape Conexión Latina’s strategic plan moving forward and to better inform the city of Newport as well as local organizations providing various social services about the Spanish-speaking communities they serve.

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Newport City Hall makes services more accessible to Hispanic residents