Video: Roy Rogers addresses council about housing probe
By Kevin Coughlin
Federal investigators are probing the Morristown Housing Authority to see if people bypassed a list to obtain rental subsidies ahead of others who in some cases had been waiting since 1993, authority Executive Director Roy Rogers told the town council on Tuesday.
A waiting list for federal Section 8 subsidies was closed to new applicants in 2003, Rogers said, resulting in the exclusion of citizens who needed housing.
Yet subsequently, “select individuals were granted benefits without being on the list. This is what the special agent is investigating,” said Rogers, who was hired in February.
Rogers said he brought his findings to the Office of the Inspector General in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Since then he has uncovered more “items of serious concern,” he said, such as overtime discrepancies and public housing units left vacant for months.
He declined to name any targets of the investigation, which he disclosed last month at a housing authority meeting that flared up behind closed doors. HUD has neither confirmed nor denied an investigation.
The council had invited Rogers to speak at its Tuesday session, which also grew heated over the course of two hours. Council President Rebecca Feldman and town Clerk Kevin Harris repeatedly asked the audience to quiet down.
At one point, a housing authority commissioner, Vera White, traded charges with an absent councilwoman, Michelle Dupree Harris, who participated via a phone hookup.
Harris insinuated that White was “terrifying” and intimidating public housing residents to support her candidate in next week’s Second Ward council race.
White, an employee in the town’s building and construction department, accused Harris, a kindergarten teacher, of recruiting students to influence parents to back her candidate. She also claimed Harris violated federal rules by campaigning inside Manahan Village, a ublic housing community.
When Harris countered that she merely had attended a friend’s party at Manahan Village, White accused her of lying and stormed from the council chambers.
Video: Public sounds off about the housing authority
‘IT BREAKS MY HEART’
There also were poignant remarks from Councilwoman Raline Smith-Reid, who said public housing enabled her to attend college and become self-sufficient. For that reason, she now rents apartments to Section 8 tenants, she said.
“It breaks my heart that this is happening here,” Smith-Reid said of the housing authority controversy.
Funded by HUD, the housing authority manages 470 apartments (270 for seniors, 200 for families) and 184 Section 8 vouchers that help people with rent payments.
So far, Rogers said, most of the problems he has identified involve Section 8. He is starting to dig into the other housing programs, he said.
The council resisted entreaties from some spectators to appoint a public housing resident, as mandated by HUD, to a vacancy on the housing authority’s unpaid, seven-member board of commissioners.
Rogers is seeking a waiver of that requirement from HUD while the investigation unfolds. He said his attempts to reform the authority are encountering resistance from some commissioners, and he appealed to the council to appoint residents who share his desire to clean things up.
Earlier on Tuesday, at the direction of Council President Feldman, notices were hand-delivered to public housing residents, inviting them to apply for appointment to the unpaid housing commission.
- Donna Howard, a resident, asks the council to appoint a public housing resident to the MHA. Photo by Kevin Coughl
That angered resident Donna Howard, who said this sudden appeal was unfair to residents who already came forward seeking the appointment.
Feldman cited the Citizens Service Act, an ordinance requiring the town to advertise openings on boards and commissions for 30 days before making selections. That means the council could take action at its meeting on Nov. 24, 2015.
But it’s not even clear how many housing authority vacancies are in play.
Authority Chairman Michael Cherello (a council appointee) and Commissioner Frank Vitolo (a gubernatorial appointee) are holdovers. And Commissioner Mary Dougherty resigned last week, saying the state Department of Community Affairs (DCA) determined she had not completed five training courses within a prescribed 18-month period.
Dougherty, the town Democratic chairwoman and wife of Mayor Tim Dougherty, started the training as an interim commissioner and completed it after being named to a full five-year term.
Rogers urged the council to reappoint Dougherty, who he praised as a diligent commissioner. The housing director said neither he nor the authority’s attorney have been able to obtain any information from DCA explaining why it reversed prior certifications of Mary Dougherty.
MorristownGreen.com put the same questions to the DCA a week ago; to date, no answers have been received.
Video: Councilwoman on the power of public housing
ESCAPE HATCH
“This thing is political, and it’s out of control,” said Vera White, asserting that Morristown’s housing authority is an unblemished model for the entire state.
Noting that Rogers independently sought a HUD waiver of the resident commissioner requirement, White asked if anyone would have tolerated such a move had it been initiated by African American commissioners.
When council members inquired if they should launch their own housing authority investigation, Assistant Town Attorney Elnardo Webster II, advised leaving the matter to the feds.
“I don’t think the Morristown council is going to do a better investigation than HUD or the Inspector General,” Webster said.
“The bottom line is, if you didn’t do anything wrong, you don’t have to worry about this investigation, period,” Rogers said, referring to people associated with the housing authority.
“And if you did do something wrong, at the end of a certain period… things are going to work better. The residents are the ones that get hurt, and they’re in the middle.”
At least Rogers has an escape hatch.
When Feldman inquired about his second gig, as part-time director of the Harrison housing authority, Rogers explained that he intended to step down when he accepted the $154,000 job in Morristown.
But as he delved into MHA operations, “I was concerned about how long I’d be employed here.”
MORE ABOUT THE MORRISTOWN HOUSING AUTHORITY
On the Roy Rogers video:
0:09 How the probe started
1:17 What’s being investigated
1:30 Commission resisting reforms
2:05 Problems only with Section 8 ?
2:43 Are present commissioners under investigation?
3:02 Is a ‘toxic environment’ hurting residents?
3:31 Asking HUD to waive a resident-commissioner rule
3:59 Audit or investigation?
4:48 Who determined Mary Dougherty did not qualify?
7:13 Please explain second job?
9:14 The Section 8 waiting list
9:47: Other problems?
10:32: How does 18-month training work?
11:24: “Embarrassed’ for MHA, concerned for residents
If this is the same Roy Rogers that was fired from another town by a clearly corrupt mayor (see: https://njlp.org/news/opengovernment/1626-former-executive-director-s-lawsuit-against-gloucester-township-housing-authority) then people should be *supporting* him here in his investigation.
Why are people so enraged by his work to hand over documents to HUD? Those who are upset that he is working with the Feds seem to have something to hide – – otherwise wouldn’t they welcome the investigation?
If the board at the housing authority gets stacked, then fires him (which is what happened in another town) we’ll all know there’s something shady going on…. Let the investigation keep going.