Menin questions MOECM budget and staffing; Sidahmed says he is alone
Menin asks for the office's current budget and staff size. Sidahmed says he is currently the only person on the team and plans to hire after assessing publisher and agency needs; Menin says she finds that hard to believe given the office's mandate.
Okay, thank you very much for your testimony.
So my first question is, what is the current size of your budget, and how many staff members do you have?
Thank you for that question.
So currently you're looking at the Mayor's Office of Ethnic and Community Media.
I'm the only person on the team, but I'm really excited to be bringing on somebody in the near future.
And I think what we want to do with this office moving forward is really understand what the needs of the publishers are,
listen to the publishers, listen to the agencies, understand how they have worked with this office in the past, and then build a team that can really reflect those needs and how we want to move forward as an office.
So I just find that hard to believe you're the only person in this office, and yet you have an enormous responsibility to ensure that 50% of the mayoral agencies,
ad buys goes to community and ethnic media.
I appreciate the question and thank you for that.
I do think that, as I mentioned, listening to the publishers and listening to the agencies is going to be really critical in these first months to understand how we can ensure this law is successful moving forward.
I think you highlighted some of the concerns of the past, and I've been hearing from publishers about some of their concerns.
So I'm excited to spend some time really trying to understand how we can build a team that can really ensure that this office is successful in the future.