The Kyle Housing Authority Board appointed former San Marcos Mayor Frank Arredondo to be the authority’s interim director this evening and guaranteed no one will attend its next meeting which it scheduled at the same time as two of the traditional New Year’s Day college football bowl games.
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| Frank Arredondo |
Arredondo, who lost a bid last year for re-election to the San Marcos City Council, will assume his new position in Kyle on Tuesday. He will succeed Vickie Simpson, whose administration of the authority came under fire from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees public housing projects. Within hours of the HUD criticism being made public, Simpson submitted her resignation effective Dec. 31.
Perhaps ironically, Arredondo is a retired HUD employee as well as the mayor of San Marcos in the 1970s. He made housing, both low-income and executive housing, a principle plank in his unsuccessful run to return to the San Marcos City Council last year.
"I oversaw several programs within HUD in West Texas and Northeast Texas," Arredondo told me shortly after the board made the announcement of his appointment. "I’ve been chair of the San Marcos Housing Authority as well. I served there for three years after I retired from HUD. I have time on my hands and I have the resources and the experience to share to help Kyle out with its housing authority."
Arredondo said the first item on his agenda will be to try and meet with each resident living in Kyle’s two complexes managed by the authority. He also said he is anxious to look into the authority’s financial ledgers and "the way the operations are set up."
He also said he would "most definitely" attempt to arrange a meeting with Simpson prior to her departure.
"She probably has more in her head than is in writing when it comes to the housing authority," Arredondo said.
He said his only interest right now is being the interim director and it "depends on how much I can get done" as to whether he will seek the position permanently. "I want to see what the possibilities are and whether this needs more time than I’m willing to give. We’ll see in the next 60 days."
The authority set the dates for its next four meetings during the next two months, the first one of which is scheduled for right about the time the Rose Bowl game between Southern California and Penn State is due to end and the Sugar Bowl contest between Oklahoma and Auburn is scheduled to begin — 6 p.m., Monday, Jan.2 The next three meetings are on the books for 6 p.m., Friday, Jan. 20; 6:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 2; and 6:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 23.
The board also agreed to approve a contract for legal services with the same firm that handles the city’s legal affairs.
I was part of a team of writers/reporters put together from all over the country to go to suburbs southeast of Houston to cover the Apollo space missions for United Press International. I especially think about one of them this time of year, Apollo 8, the first mission to orbit the moon, which rocketed into space exactly 48 years ago tomorrow, circled the moon 10 times on Christmas Eve and finally splashed down in the Pacific on Dec. 27. At that time, there was a weekly magazine called Life and reporters and photographers from that magazine had exclusive access inside the homes of the Apollo astronauts. But the fawning public wanted every bit of news about the astronauts and their families as could be fed, so when I wasn’t at my desk at the UPI Space Center bureau, I was parked outside an astronaut’s home, just in case one member of the family left the house for any reason. Because if one of them left the house for any reason, that was news. One of my favorite Christmas gifts of all time was delivered to me late Christmas Eve of 1968, when Barbara Lovell, the then 15-year-old daughter of Apollo 8 astronaut James Lovell, walked out of her home and up to my car to bring me a couple of homemade cookies and a cup of steaming hot coffee.
Beginning with Apollo 11, the first moon landing, the returning astronauts were placed in quarantine for three weeks to make sure they did not return bearing some kind of lunar disease. For reasons too complicated to go into here, I was the UPI reporter chosen to remain behind after the missions were completed to cover the "astronauts-in-quarantine" period. Nothing happened while the astronauts were in quarantine. Nothing. There were no news announcements from Mission Control about what the astronauts were doing while quarantined and, frankly, even if there had been, I sincerely doubt anyone would have given a green bean. To put it mildly, there was nothing in my journalistic career more boring and totally non-eventful than covering astronauts in quarantine.
Except executive sessions.
Now, to be fair, I have to admit that although some of them seem like it, I never seen an executive session last as long as an astronaut’s quarantine. But executive sessions are also far more frequent. Between July 1969 and December 1972, there were a total of six — count ‘em, just six — Apollo moon missions and only half of those resulted in quarantines (Apollo 13 didn’t count, because it’s moon landing was aborted and the quarantine requirement was abandoned following Apollo 14).
So naturally I reacted with some measure of glee this evening when I learned the City Council’s Thursday specially called meeting, which was created just so council members could go into a prolonged executive session to hash out revised terms for City Manager Scott Sellers’s contract extension, had been cancelled and will not be rescheduled until some time in 2017, even after the Council’s first regularly scheduled first meeting of the year on Jan. 3. No date has been set, but I’m betting it was also be a special called meeting.
So that mean’s there’s only one executive session on tap for Thursday evening; however, I’m anticipating that one will be a doozy because during that time, the Kyle Housing Authority Board will be interviewing prospective candidates to be the authority’s interim director and then debating among themselves which of those candidates should be named to the position, starting Jan. 1.
As for me, I will be wistfully thinking about a Christmas Eve visit from an astronaut’s daughter, bearing homemade cookies and hot coffee.
Kyle Housing Authority Board Chairman Daniel Harper said tonight it is the desire of the board to emerge from its executive session at next Thursday’s meeting and announce the hiring of an interim director for the authority.
The authority’s embattled current executive director, Vickie Simpson, has submitted her resignation effective Dec. 31.
Depending on the number of candidates the board chooses to interview, that could make for an exhaustively long executive session next week. You would have to estimate a complete and thorough process would take at least one hour for each candidate interviewed.
Last week the board said it was considering a number of different options involving executive leadership at the authority, but tonight Board member Clara Rodriguez said the board has decided to go with the option of hiring an interim director and that she expected the city to post the position on its web site.
"Our No. 1 objective right now is to get an interim executive director," Harper said. "My hope is that at the next meeting we will have made the progress we need to make, do the interviewing we need to do with the candidates and be in a position to make a decision as soon as possible."
After the meeting was over, Harper elaborated even further.
"My hope is that my fellow commissioners will do the groundwork they need to do to have the most viable candidates in for executive session next Thursday and approve one next Thursday after executive session," he said.
Next Thursday’s meeting will be the third consecutive Thursday meeting held by the board and its final one for 2016, Harper said. Beginning next year, he wants the board to meet biweekly and then quickly move to monthly and soon after that quarterly meetings. No meetings beyond next week’s, however, have been scheduled. Harper said he would ask the board’s vice chair, Michelle Lopez, to survey board members to determine convenient days and times for them o meet and then to coordinate those schedules with the city secretary.
The board also approved a one-year contract with a San Antonio accounting firm to conduct its audit for the fiscal year that ended this past June 30, but delayed for a week a decision on whether to approve a contract with the same attorneys that currently provide legal services to the city. Currently the board is receiving no outside legal advice or guidance.
The newly formed Kyle Housing Authority board is playing it pretty close to the vest.
In the second meeting of its existence last night, four members of the five-member board showed up (the fifth position is listed on the city’s website as "vacant’) and within eight minutes of being called into order, recused itself into an executive session that lasted an hour and 10 minutes, six times longer than the entire public meeting, a meeting which was newsworthy only because of who was on the agenda to appear, but didn’t.
That no-show was the authority’s embattled, but soon-to-retire, executive director Vickie Simpson, whose management of the authority here in Kyle recently came under severe criticism from HUD, a criticism that quickly led to the formation of the committee that met last night. The agenda called for Simpson, whose resignation is effective at the end of the year, to present a "General Overview," an agenda caption that is, in itself, far from specific and provided an umbrella under which she could have gone on about anything from Old Town Kyle gentrification to the effect the appointment of Dr. Ben Carson as the new housing secretary will have on public housing.
Instead we learned from board chairman Daniel Harper that Simpson "was not available to be with us today. Instead, me and commissioner (Michelle) Lopez were able to meet with her yesterday. It was a good discussion. She gave us an idea how the Housing Authority functioned and I’m looking forward to a good transition as she goes into retirement."
And that was it. No mention of any sort of accountability or explanations or rebuttals to HUD accusations , just a simple "She gave us an idea how the Housing Authority functioned."
So much for a "General Overview" for public consumption.
As of this writing, neither Harper nor Lopez have responded to my written request seeking more information about their meeting with Simpson. If and when they do, I will update this report. (Harper ultimately responded by email to my request on Monday, Dec. 12, but was not any more forthcoming, illuminating, informative or revealing about the meeting with Simpson. "The meeting allowed us to start a dialog with Ms. Simpson on the history of the Housing Authority, the current ‘day to day’ operations and the challenges faced," he wrote. "We also discussed her retirement and the transition between executive directors. We were appreciative of the time Ms. Simpson gave us." No mention of why she has refused to give her time in a public forum, as well.)
As far as replacing Simpson as the executive director, board members Clara Rodriguez and David Salazar were appointed members of a subcommittee tasked with leading the search for Simpson’s successor.
"We’re looking at the possibility of all different options," Salazar said. "One possibility might be the appointment of an interim executive director after our current executive director leaves. Second would be the engagement of a management firm to make sure our residents are being taken care of. The last option would be to actually hire and post the position possibly with the consent of the City of Kyle and using their resources to help us find a suitable candidate so that we can take care of our residents."
The board also heard from two representatives of the San Antonio-based accounting firm that will perform the authority’s audit, which the representatives said will be submitted by the end of the next June, and from Kyle Chief of Staff Jerry Hendrix who said the attorneys being retained by the city could be made available to the board for legal consultation and advice.
The board is scheduled to meet again next Thursday at 5:45 p.m. in the council chambers.
The newly constituted board for the Kyle Housing Authority met for the first time last night and took immediate action to hold three more meetings before the end of the year. Other than that ...?
The upcoming meetings have been scheduled for 5:45 p.m. on Dec 8, Dec. 15, and Dec. 22 in the City Council Chambers at City Hall.
The four board members who met (criminal defense attorney Veronica Sanders did not attend this initial meeting) also voted to name Daniel Harper, deputy vice chancellor for finance at Texas State, as its char, and former Kyle City Council member Michelle Lopez as its vice chair.
Mayor Todd Webster appointed the members to the board (the two others are Lisa Adams, community relations coordinator for the Central Texas Medical Center, and longtime Kyle resident Clara Rodriguez) after receiving a copy of a letter from a HUD regional director in San Antonio addressed to the executive director of the Kyle Housing Authority describing the findings of an inspection that revealed, among other things, some residents were living in apartments in one of the two housing units managed by the authority that didn’t contain operable stoves or refrigerators.
"For me, one of the things you can’t lose sight of is that it’s not the executive director, it’s not the board, it’s there are people that live in these two units that have needs that have to be addressed," Harper said after last night’s meeting adjourned. "That’s where I really think we need to go — worry about the present day, then the future and then we can talk about the past."
I asked whether the daily living conditions of residents should be the concern of the board or the authority’s executive director and how much emphasis the board was going to place on the hiring of a new director in lieu of the resignation, effective at the end of the year, submitted by the authority’s current director and accepted at last night’s meeting.
"The authority will rest with the Housing Authority board," Lopez said. "I think we have to determine quickly what the authority of the new director will be so we won’t have a break in that service."
When I asked specifically if they felt a sense of urgency about hiring a new executive director, Lopez said "I think we’re all concerned that we don’t have a break in what’s available so we’re working to figure out what to do so we can put some plans in place before the holidays coming up."
Both Lopez and Harper said they have had no communications with the authority’s current executive director, Vickie Simpson. But Lopez also said they weren’t officially sworn in as board members until last night’s meeting so that they had no authority to meet with Simpson.
"We are really starting today from ground zero at this moment in our roles," Lopez said.
In a letter made public during last night’s city council meeting, the regional office of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development accused the quasi-governmental Kyle Housing Authority of depriving tenants of such items as a workable refrigerator, spending funds without required approvals and not keeping records of how those monies were spent.
HUD said the authority’s executive director basically tripled her own salary, without any outside approvals, while at the same time leaving housing units without operable refrigerators and stoves for years.
Although the letter did not blame anyone by name for these wrongdoings, HUD said the authority operated without a required governing board and that the only two persons HUD could find with any responsibility for actions within the authority were its executive director, Vickie Simpson, and an unnamed maintenance person.
David Pohler, the director of HUD’s regional office in San Antonio, signed the letter which was addressed to Simpson with copies to Kyle Mayor Todd Webster and the city’s chief of staff, Jerry Hendrix. It was Mayor Webster who revealed the contents of the letter during last night’s council meeting. The charges leveled were based on an personal inspections in 2013 and 2105 as well as local interviews conducted by HUD employee Dan Garcia in March.
After receiving his copy of the Pohler letter and making initial inquiries as to its contents, Mayor Webster also said he received a letter of resignation Friday from Simpson. Technically, an executive director’s letter of resignation should be submitted to the association’s board of directors, but in Kyle’s case, such a board doesn’t exist any longer. The mayor said last night he is in the process of trying to convince five individuals, whom he described as eminently capable, to serve on a newly reconstituted board of directors.
Although a local housing authority is its own governing body and has no direct relationship to municipal government, HUD has, in the past, levied huge fines against cities because of actions undertaken by local housing authorities, although most of those penalties appear to stem from policy actions undertaken by city councils and/or city administrators that HUD believes result in housing discrimination subsequently practiced by authorities.
According to this website, the Kyle Housing Authority owns and operates one project containing 21 affordable rental units and administers 10 Section 8 housing vouchers. However, during last night’s city council meeting references were made to a pair of KHA rental locations. I personally am aware of only the one located on Burleson near St. Anthony’s Catholic Church. City spokesperson Kim Hilsenbeck later informed me the other KHA housing project is located at 417 W. 2nd Street, which is also the address for the authority itself.
In other news stemming from last night’s council meeting, city Finance Director Perwez Moheet told me residents should be prepared to see the new $5 stormwater fee included in their monthly utility bills beginning with the one that will be due for payment in January. The fee is one of the results, although not the most important one by any means, of the council’s approval by a 6-1 vote on second reading last night of the ordinance creating the utility needed to manage the city’s stormwater system. Council member Daphne Tenorio cast the lone vote against the proposal, arguing the city didn’t need a separate stormwater utility. "When we first started talking about it, it sounded like a good idea," she told me after the meeting. "But then I kept thinking about it. This is stuff we should already be having done for us anyway. The city should already be responsible for it, so why are you charging us for it.." When I reminded her that state law mandates a utility be funded with a separate fee, she said "We shouldn’t be charging people for this. It should be something that was already taken care of." When I argued that "taking care if it," no matter when its done or starts, still costs money, she replied "It should have been taken care of from the beginning. It’s something that should already have been taken care of." Although she wasn’t specific about "the beginning" of what, exactly, there is a grain of truth in her argument, but the other truth inherent in that argument is that "already taken care of" means the utility, and the fees to fund it, should have been established many years ago, which, arguably, could have prevented much of the flooding that struck the city twice last year.
Earlier in the meeting, Mayor Webster and Stomwater Director Kathy Roecker agreed a fee was required to be implemented "per state statute." "The statute instructs us in the way to establish the utility," the mayor said. ‘If we created instead a division within the Public Works Department and funded it with a property tax increase it would be subject to the prioritization of future councils and we wouldn’t have any consistency or permanency with it. Our goal is to establish something permanent and establish a utility that follows the state statute."
I also found it fascinating that while I have seen a lot of public criticism of the new fee on social media, only two individuals came to the council last night to speak on the subject and even they came only to seek answers to questions they had about the proposal. Both acknowledged that Roecker’s presentation to the council answered those questions to their satisfaction. So much for public outrage.
I found it even more fascinating, while also somewhat bewildering, that, possibly because of that aforementioned flooding, all the talk about the new utility’s operations has revolved around the amount of water flowing through the city’s stormwater drainage systems. Of equal importance, although it’s been a topic that has been largely ignored, is the quality of that stormwater. Unlike wastewater, stormwater is not sent to a treatment facility where all the contaminants are removed. Stormwater flows right into downstream creeks and rivers, whose pollution levels are precisely monitored. Kyle has not reached the population level, nor is it likely to do anytime in the foreseeable future, that would force the EPA to measure the city’s stormwater quality on a daily basis. If at some future time, however, a community downstream from Kyle notices increases in water pollution levels and can successfully trace the source of that pollution to Kyle stormwater, the EPA could intervene and take punitive action against the city. I do have two pieces of good news to impart on this subject, however. The first is, I have been informed by many individuals one of the main reasons Roecker was hired to manage the Kyle utility was her unquestioned knowledge in the area of stormwater quality. The second piece of good news is, that while many here in Kyle, including yours truly, lament about the lack of industry or similar business development in the city, that type of business activity brings with it reduced stormwater quality runoff.
But back to the housing authority fiasco. The HUD letter addressed the following "concerns" the department has about the Kyle Housing Authority:
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Unauthorized cost: Work is charged to the Public Housing program without personnel activity reports or equivalent documentation to identify time worked in each program. Specifically, the agency noted $65,660 in maintenance and operation costs the authority claimed to have spent during the last five years even though, according to the letter, Simpson "could not provide any justification or produce any supporting documentation or copies or board minutes discussing the authorizing of these expenses." In addition, Pohler wrote, Simpson contracted "a few years ago" with a private vendor to build storage sheds and to install cabinets inside each of the units, but "she was unable to produce any procurement documentation for these two projects."
- For the last five years the authority has had no existing board chairperson or board co-chairperson.
- An unsupported salary for the executive director with "incremental increases that have tripled in value."
- Unsupported pay increases for the authority’s unnamed maintenance worker.
- Unsupported travel expenses.
- Unsupported employee benefits contributions.
- Unsupported compensated absences during the last six years.
- No procurement policy that is reviewed and authorized by a board of commissioners.
- Unsupported contractual expenses that were not approved beforehand by a board of commissioners.
- Maintenance charges not pre-authorized by a board of commissioners.
- Inadequate unit maintenance through the year. Specifically, HUD reported that six of the apartment units contained refrigerators that were either damaged, completely inoperable or missing entirely. Not only that, these same findings were discovered during inspections held in 2013 and then again last year. Apparently nothing was done to correct many of the deficiencies HUD discovered from its 2013 inspection. It also reported among the deficiencies that three units had ranges/stoves that were missing, damaged or inoperable and that the same units also had leaking faucets and pipes. Other deficiencies noted included damaged hardware/locks, and deteriorated or missing seals.
"Something drastic needs to happen within this organization to get it functioning again and to get it functioning properly," Mayor Webster told the council last night. He added he wanted this subject to be a part of last night’s agenda because he found "this staggeringly weird lack of any public record of anything related to this organization." He added that the five persons he wants to name to the newly reconstituted board of directors "need some support so that they can get the organization up and running."
Webster said when he began looking into the authority, after receiver his copy of the letter from Pohler, he discovered the authority had taken out "a rather large" 50-year loan at 9 percent interest with a balloon payment at the end of its term. He said the support the board needs is because "There’s the potential opportunity for refinancing some of those things that I don’t believe anyone we would put in this position right off the bat would have the necessary expertise." To cite one example, because of the authority’s current financial malfunctions, as referenced in the Pohler letter, Webster hoped "the city could provide, at (City Manager Scott) Sellers’s discretion, some time for Mr. Moheet to examine some of these financial issues so that advice could be provided to this new board."
In other action last night, the council:
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Received another in its on-going series of progress reports on the five road bond projects. Although the city maintains you can learn the status of the various projects by looking in the city's web site, my journey to that page indicated the information on it had not been updated in the last three months, specifically since Aug. 5..
- Learned the Goodwill outlet under construction immediately east of Wal-Mart is scheduled to open Thursday, Dec. 1.
- Voted unanimously to reappoint Elizabeth Correy and appoint Daniel Owings to the Library Board.
- Except for one pulled item, unanimously approved a consent agenda that contained the public condemnation of property along Burleson and yield signs at the Cleveland and McGarity roundabout in Plum Creek, one of which would replace a stop sign currently located there. Tenorio pulled one item from the consent agenda so she could be the only council member to vote against a budget amendment necessary to provide a $480,000 interest free loan to defense contractor RSI, Inc., that, among other things, will help the company repay back property taxes. Tenorio earlier said the company should have been paying those taxes all along, even though evidence revealed RSI did, indeed, attempt on multiple occasions to pay the taxes, but was rebuked by Hays County which told the company the taxes were not the company’s responsibility.
- Postponed consideration of the Parks Master Plan.
- Unanimously approved on first readings ordinances to annex 5.5 acres between FM 2770 and FM 1626 just northeast of Mountain City and rezone the property so that both duplexes and single family residences can be constructed on it.
- Postponed until January, or until after the Planning and Zoning Commission acts on the item, an ordinance applying a different kind of residential zoning to 53 acres on the north side of Bebee Road, a quarter mile west of Dacy.
- With a complete change of heart and conviction from its last meeting, voted 6-1 to approve a $270,000 expenditure for preliminary engineering services needed to relocate the railroad siding that results in the train stoppages that block traffic on Center Street. Tenorio cast the lone no vote, arguing the money should not come from city funds but from the Hays County bond proceeds approved by voters last week even though the county has made no mention when it might attempt to sell those bonds or even if it would permit the city to use the bond proceeds for any other purpose other than what was specifically outlined in the ballot proposal.
- Decided it would not hold its regularly scheduled second meeting next month because the date of that meeting, Dec. 20, might interfere with holiday plans.
- Learned its retreat has been scheduled for 8 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 7, in the council chambers.
- Spent two and a half hours in closed executive session, finally adjourning at 11:43 p.m., four hours and 42 minutes after it was gaveled into session.
