Today Councilmember Helen Diane Foster announced that she has introduced Intro 283 before the City Council to help eliminate and prevent discrimination in City government and City agencies.

The purpose of Intro 283 is “to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to identifying, eliminating and preventing discrimination, and promoting human rights in governmental operations.”

Intro 283 is called the Human Rights Government in Operations Audit Law or the Human Rights GOAL Law.

NYC law prohibits discrimination based on race, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, disability, language, religion, immigration status, political affiliation, and national birth. The intent of this human rights G.O.A.L. legislation is to institutionalize proactive measures to identify, eliminate, and prevent discrimination that may be systemic in the policies, practices, programs, services, budgets, contracts, and employment of city government.

The Human Rights G.O.A.L. legislation requires that each city agency or department conduct a local human rights audit and a human rights analysis to identify discrimination in its administration, and to develop an affirmative human rights action plan to remedy such discrimination. Such audit, analysis, and action plan is to be submitted in a report to the Mayor, the City Council, and a human rights task force. The human rights task force shall approve the specific measures and timetables for remedy of the action plan of a city agency. The task force shall consist of five mayoral-appointed voting members and three non-voting members from the EEOC of the Dept. of Citywide Administrative Services, the Human Rights Commission, and the Equal Employment Practices Committee. There shall be opportunity for community involvement such as public hearings.

###