CRHA Work Session   11/12/2020

with the Police Civilian Review Board, and I'll be conducting a presentation there.

So I just made you co-host.

If Dave pops on, Dave Norris, I'll make him co-host as well.

And I'll be on until about 6.15.

So I'll take care of any public comment until that point.

Okay.

Thank you.

Sure.

The one thing that I'm using another device to host this meeting, so I don't have access to my timer that is usually visible.

So I'll just keep time and let you know when time is up.

Perfect, thank you.

That is a very good question.

Okay, I'll go ahead and facilitate any public comment until I have to jump off around 6.15.

Hey Joe, Miss Hite will be presenting the admin plan and she does have a presentation to present.

Yeah, I'll go ahead and allow her to share

on the screen, I'm doing that now.

And you'll have access to that too, John, since you're co-host.

Okay, great.

Why don't we let everyone, give everyone a couple more minutes to log in.

I did hear from Miss Slaughter that she won't be joining us.

Let's see, it's 504.

You think we should get started, Mr.

I think that may be a good idea.

Some people might want to catch, I think there's a budget work session today.

But some people may want to jump on that.

OK. OK, so let's go ahead.

Hello, everyone.

I think I can see everyone.

So this is a virtual work session for the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, November 12, 5pm.

And

Let me read.

We are meeting according to Governor Northam's executive order number 53.

Governor Northam issued an executive order EO 53, restricting public gatherings of greater than 10 persons.

Accordingly, code 2.2-3708.

8.2a3, permits public bodies to meet electronically to discuss business required or necessary to operation of the public body

and discharge of its lawful purposes, duties and responsibilities in times of emergencies and to address COVID-19.

Therefore, this meeting is being held electronically pursuant to Virginia law because the COVID-19 pandemic makes it impractical and unsafe to assemble a quorum physically in a single location.

Let's see.

All right.

And we'll see, do a roll call of commissioners.

I'm sorry.

Commissioner Green.

I'm sorry.

Here, present.

Commissioner Osteen.

Here.

Commissioner Mayor Walker.

Commissioner Slaughter.

OK, great.

That's OK.

I mean.

All right, let's do a short moment of silence before we get started.

Wonderful, okay.

We do have the emergency meeting tomorrow from two to four o'clock with Charlottesville Police Department and others.

Right, and I'm assuming, I think Mr. Norris or Mr.

And flyers will go out to all the sites.

Today they went out to West Haven.

Wonderful, thank you.

And our main work for this evening is discussing the housing choice voucher admin plan and an update on the annual plan.

But we are opening to public comment right now.

I think it doesn't have to be about that.

I just wanted to give a preview.

It looks like

Mr. Collins is here.

Anyway, does anyone have a comment at this time?

I'm unmuted.

Thank you.

Hey, y'all.

It's been a really busy week for Housing Authority.

I know you all have been working on admin plan and annual plan for a little bit now.

It's been hard for PHAR to coordinate written comments to these just yet, but we do, as always, appreciate the coordination.

Looking forward to your discussion tonight.

Some of us have reviewed some of the annual plan and particularly enthusiastic about looking at home ownership, making sure you're doing all the correct things, thinking ahead in terms of what needs to be done for redevelopment.

I think one big thing that typically happens with the annual plan in the past, it has not been consistent with

the city's consolidated plan or the area consolidated plan.

We usually have some kind of comment about that.

It's almost always because the consolidated plan itself was not consistent with itself and it wasn't really y'all's fault.

But I think that's been corrected really with the consolidated plan.

That will be nice to hopefully say that it is consistent.

The other is, we've had issue pretty much every year with how a relationship with police department is reported to HUD.

And again, this is really no fault of y'all's, but I think that the kind of coordination receiving reports from police department at board meetings, for example,

Those are the types of things that should be improved.

And in the past, it really seems to be lack of involvement by the police and not so much something you all do.

And I think, you know, given everything that's going on, maybe some discussion of what that might look like in the annual plan might be warranted as well.

Otherwise, we're busily working through the plan, comparing it to previous plans, and we will offer comments hopefully before the public meetings that are scheduled for next week.

But I know you wanna have a chance to respond to those comments before you submit and approve the plan.

Okay, great, thank you.

And there'll be another time for public comment at the end of the meeting as well.

And we didn't announce, but maybe after we finished talking about, as we talk about the annual plan, we failed to mention the community input meetings for that next week.

So let's remember to do that.

So should we move ahead with, let's see here.

Mr.

Sales, how do you wanna go about presenting the admin plan?

Okay.

Okay so I am going to attempt to share my screen real quick because

We have put together a little bit of a PowerPoint to help us get through the 17 chapters.

That is the admin plan.

I did do my best.

Well, I did my best to pick out the key areas in which, you know, there's been some drastic changes, most for the better.

So I will go through this as quickly but as thoroughly as possible, not to tie everybody up tonight and just to give

Some key topic areas like I discussed.

And if there's any questions about any areas, would you guys like to talk about them while we're in that chapter or hold them to the end?

I know that some people are gonna have to jump off to go to the city budget questions.

Absolutely perfect.

And I'm gonna apologize in advance if y'all hear Godzilla stomping through the house.

My autistic son is a little bit off the hook this afternoon.

So quick about it is your HCV administrative plan is the housing choice voucher formal policy for the CRHA.

The last known admin plan that we're aware of that was adopted was 2013.

So with it being that long ago, there's been a lot of key PIH updates that are not included in the administrative plan right now.

and that creates a lack of needs that are being met for both CRHA and our clients.

What is the admin plan?

The administrative plan is required by HUD.

The purpose of the admin plan is to establish policies for carrying out the program in a manner consistent with HUD requirements and local goals.

Can you guys see my screen by the way?

Okay, I'm gonna assume that's a yes.

The administrative plan is a supporting document to the CRHA agency plan.

It's always available for public review.

For anybody who wishes to see it, there's a copy in the offices.

The admin plan is set forth to define CRHA's local policies for operation of the housing choice voucher program.

And those policies are in accordance to federal laws and regulations.

As we go through it, there'll be different things that we talk about where HUD says there's must and there may's.

As most of you know, in federal regulation, we're given the opportunity for mandatory policies.

Those are the must that HUD says we absolutely must do in accordance to the 24 CFR 982.

And then HUD allows us some aspects where we may.

Those are the optional non-bagging items.

The must are driven by legislation regulations, current handbook notices and legal opinions where the Mays are included in guidebooks notices that have expired, but they're recommended that the HUD staff continues to utilize them.

Current policies based upon HUD guidance is not mandatory, but they provide CRHA with what's called safe harbor laws.

The safe harbor laws are recommendations and suggestions

that are made consistent with mandatory policies.

So it kind of gives CRHA, we're gonna give you the leeway to do these things, but be careful that you're still following the guidelines.

Let us give you the safe harbor.

So we have adopted the NAMCA template for the HCB admin plan.

And that template is based on safe harbor, but it also allows CRHA to,

Let's focus on some of the key demographics for our area, for our clientele, for our local and state laws and regulations as well.

So the key for this tonight is to literally touch on items that are newer than we're used to seeing and that will have some impact on the program.

Normally the admin plans have said that the jurisdiction in which CRHA will lease up vouchers has been the City of Charlottesville.

We are working on an MOU with Albemarle, Fluvanna, Green, and Nelson.

All but Albemarle will be through BHDA.

Albemarle County, of course, will be with Albemarle County to allow a greater jurisdiction to be able to utilize the number of vouchers that HUD has granted us to use.

533 households leasing up in the city of Charlottesville alone would probably not be very feasible since the city of Charlottesville itself is very small and pertains to a lot of

College Housing.

So that's a big change for the housing authority.

It's going to allow us greater span of places for people to be able to find housing that they can afford.

As most of you are aware, there are some key areas of the HCV partnerships.

There is the HUD funding that comes to CRHA.

Through that, we have to

have the program regulations and be in good standings with that in order to continue to get that funding.

That funding allows us to minister a program to both participants and to landlords.

So once you get down to that CRHA administration part it becomes a very contractual business.

The HCV participants are in a contract with CRHA which is their voucher and it has very specified family obligations to continue to receive housing.

And then the owners are in a contract with CRHA as well through the housing assistance payment contract, which gives the owner very specific guidelines and all that they have to follow.

And then of course the family and the landlord go into their own contract, which is the lease.

While CRHA doesn't have a hand in that lease part per se, it does, we do have some ability to, you know, make sure that the landlord's holding up his end of the lease as well as the family's holding up their end of the lease.

Chapter two of the admin is solely based on fair housing and equal opportunities.

This chapter explains the laws and HUD regulations required by CRHA to affirmatively further civil rights and fair housing in all federally assisted housing programs.

This is the spirit of the laws and implemented through consistent policies and processes.

The responsibility to further non-discrimination pertains to all areas of CRHA's housing

Joyce Voucher Program.

Part of this chapter talks about reasonable accommodations in HCV program.

Most of these rules that you see on the screen now have been in place for quite some time.

The newer ones to the policy right now would be those last two bullet points.

The equal access to housing programs regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

That rule was clarified in 2014, so that would not have been in that 2013 policy.

And then the VAWA, the Violence Against Women's Act, it was revamped in a 2017 update to give more protection in regards to the aspects of the VAWA rules.

At any time, if there would be more than one civil right law that would apply to a situation,

The laws would be read and applied together.

When it comes to reasonable accommodations, it looks a lot different for HCV than it would for the public housing program.

In public housing, CRHA is basically the landlord.

So there's a lot more to the reasonable accommodation policies for that program.

For the HCV program, we would be focusing mostly on policy,

for accommodations of people who may need a live-in aid so they would need a larger subsidy standard or someone who would need a larger subsidy standard because they would have medical equipment and supplies so they would need extra storage room for that.

The biggest thing with HCV would be if someone couldn't make it to the office or we would need to conduct home visits or virtual re-examinations to be able to allow them to stay

in compliance with their annual requirements.

And then again, like I said, the increased voucher payment standards for necessity to be able to have equal opportunity to the program.

Chapter three talks about our eligibility criteria.

Nothing much has really changed in this aspect.

The family

still has to qualify under the income stipulations that HUD puts in place through the, so HUD does surveys basically of the area medium incomes.

And for the HDP program, the family has to be at or below the very low standards.

They still have to provide their social security numbers and their immigration or citizenship status.

They still have to provide, sign the consent forms that are required of them in order to be eligible.

and they still have to make sure that there are certain past behaviors that HUD says that we have to prohibit if they have participated in those.

The biggest one with the eligibility is that first bullet point that qualifies as a family is defined by HUD.

Before a family tend to lean more towards parent and children or multiple people to be a family.

Now HUD has defined family as any

One person can be a household, it can be a family or multiple people can be a family.

It's not specifically by marriage or blood relation or the type of things that they used to qualify a family as.

Income limits, we could just kind of talked about this.

They're only verified at admission.

If you come into the program because you are at that very low income limits for your family size,

Your income will never rule you out of the program from there.

I kind of say that and then I kind of think, well, that's not true.

But we will never look at your income and say, you're no longer qualified to be in the program.

What can happen is that you can increase your income to the point to where we don't make an assistance payment for you.

And we'll talk about that a little bit more when we get into the income calculation part.

In the past, HUD used to say that college students could not participate in the H3 program.

Studies were done.

It was found out that in order to be able to afford college, some students may need assistance with things like housing.

So they changed the law or the rules that say that a student can participate in the housing choice voucher if they're of legal contract age for their state, if they've just established a household

separate from their parents for at least one year prior to applying for the HDB program or if they meet the US Department of Education's definition of independent student.

So this has opened up some avenues for students to be able to have kind of the cushion they need to be able to afford to further their education.

There are some reasons for denial of application.

HUD does lay out some specifics as to why we would have to.

A family that does not meet the eligibility criteria discussed in this chapter will be denied assistance.

In this section, it discusses other situations and circumstances in which a denial of assistance mandatory for CRHA and those in which denial is optional for CRHA.

Criminal activity, per that CFR there,

If any household member is currently engaged in or has engaged in any of the following criminal activities in the past three years, the family will be denied assistance.

HUD defines drug-related criminal activity as illegal manufacturer, sale, distribution, or use of drugs, or the possession of a drug with intent to manufacture, sale, or dispute.

and they define criminal activity as one of the elements that uses attempts to use or threatens the use of physical force, which was likely to cause serious bodily injury to property or property damage.

A criminal activity that may threaten the health, safety or right of peaceful enjoyment of the premises by other residents or persons residing in immediate vicinity.

And by immediate vicinity, they mean within a three block radius

and criminal activity that may threaten the health or safety of property owners, management staff or persons performing contract administrative functions on behalf of CRHA.

They go further to talk about any conviction for drug related or violent criminal activity within the past three years and that records of arrest for drug related or violent criminal activity within the past three years, although the record of arrest would not be the sole basis for the denial.

Can I ask a question?

Yes, definitely.

And just thinking of the arrest, the past three years, if someone's looking for a voucher, anyone in that family cannot

have, I'm just trying to, is there wiggle room like you're saying to look more so that there's an investigation to see if the drug related charge is, you know, serious enough?

I guess I'm just wondering, do people ever come in and get an investigation to allow them to be part of the program?

So we do look at the seriousness of the case, especially with regards to other residents and their safety.

The effect that the denial would have on other members of the family who were not involved in the action or the failure to act.

The extent of participation of the individual family members.

You know, was there a disability that may have led to it?

Was there an act of domestic violence or dating violence?

And then also the length of time since the violation occurred, like was that person potentially a minor at that time?

Or has there been, you know, a record of, you know, therapies or treatments or anything since then that would give you a likelihood that it wouldn't happen again in the future?

Like I said, the record of arrest would not be used for the sole basis of denial.

It could trigger an investigation, determining whether the applicant actually engaged in a disqualifying criminal activity.

We would obtain additional information, you know, police reports, arrest records, or, you know, any type of institutionalization that would come from that.

I said that we would talk about, you know, statements from witnesses and all, but I don't know how far that would go.

Cause that kind of my opinion leads to hearsay type situation.

If we were going to look at a witness statements or anything, I think that would be part of the criminal charges, the police file.

Evidence of criminal conduct that would be, that will be considered if indicated and demonstrated a risk for safety and or property.

You know, if it's something where, I mean, there's so many avenues to this and the fact that it isn't an automatic denial, we get to look into it further, I think helps the case here.

It doesn't say automatically you have to go.

And in the past, there used to be a one strike policy and that was it.

So, you know, here we require the applicant to provide us the evidence that there has been, you know,

Clean Record Sense or types of drug rehabs or other types of anger management, things like that, that would help us be able to say, all right, so we had this, it was in the timeframe that we're not allowed to admit, but we're gonna look into this further and see where we can go with that.

Yes, thank you.

I just, yeah.

And I assume,

So it's sort of upon the applicant to provide evidence.

And it's not something that we see a whole lot in the past when this has been something that has come to light.

You know, there's been,

If it was something really, really fresh and, you know, still actively going on, then it was something that we could work with the probation officers or whoever it is that they were working with to try to clear it up for themselves so that we could almost kind of like a repayment plan for not paying your rent.

You know, we're going to do this based on the fact that you've got this requirements that you have to do to

You know, stay in the community as long as you're meeting your requirements with your probation officer or your therapist or whoever it is you're working with, then you'll stay in good standing for the program.

So there are avenues that we can look into to not automatically say you can't come join our program.

Screen don't want to change.

Here we go.

How we're going to accept applications has changed a little bit for us.

So in the past, when the wait list would open, we would immediately have the applicant fill out that like nine to 12 page application, have to bring all of your proof of social security numbers, photo IDs, birth certificates, proof of income, just everything that we would need at that point in time.

And, you know, it's not a quick process when you're looking at mass application,

You know, some people wouldn't show up because they didn't have all those things.

So there is now a two-step process to this.

If we are going to open our wait list and we think that we're going to issue a voucher to everybody that we're taking an application in 60 days of the data application, then yes, that's going to be the process we do.

We're going to start the eligibility process the day of application so that, you know, that speeds up the process in order to be able to get them to these vouchers.

If we're gonna open up that wait list and we don't think we're gonna touch those applications within 60 days, then we're gonna do what's called the two-step application process.

We're initially gonna take a very one-sheet basic information.

Who are you?

Where do you live?

And how can we contact you?

And things like social security numbers and all that we need to populate our wait list.

This will allow us to take the number of applications that we need a lot quicker.

Any verifications that we utilize for eligibility or any other process in the program should not be greater than 60 days old.

It saves the applicant from having to repeat the process over and over and over again until we're actually at the point where we can issue them a voucher.

Once we accept that application, we'll send them written notification of their preliminary eligibility determination saying we've received your application and you are now on our wait list within 10 days of receiving that application.

Putting them on that wait list and telling them that they are preliminarily eligible.

Is that a word?

Does not in fact mean that they are eligible.

It means that we've accepted your application.

You've given us what we needed to get you on our wait list to potentially receive assistance.

And that final determination of eligibility will be made once we select them from that wait list and start the eligibility complete process.

Applications will be

placed on the wait list according to the date and time of application and the preference for CRHA's HVU wait list, which is resident of the city of Charlottesville at the time of application.

We're gonna change a little bit how we announced the opening of the wait list.

I am not going to pretend like I know that exact number of business days that we used to notify the community that the waitlist was going to be open, but now it will, the community will be notified 10 days, 10 business days prior to the opening of the waitlist.

We will give public notice through media outlets like we always have, you know, we'll utilize the Daily Progress, Seville the Day, NBC 29, CBS 19, and other media outlets as we can

presented out there.

We'll also post it on our website and the Facebook page.

And we will continue the efforts of outreach by working with community partners who may assist the low income individuals who would qualify for our programs.

I will submit a copy of the applications and forms to those agencies so that they can assist their clientele to get those back into us.

and we'll make sure that of course agencies that work with the disabled community will get that information as well.

We will close our wait list when it's estimated that there's gonna be a waiting period of house assistance of 24 months for the most current applicants.

If we were to be granted funding for a specific demographics, so like we're working on the mainstream and that's for

Individuals 60 and under who have a disability who are facing homelessness are being released from a institutional type setting.

So we may elect to open a wait list just long enough to get the applicants we need for a program like that.

Or of course, when we proceed through our redevelopment and we're ready to issue project-based vouchers, that would be a different type of application process that we could open the list for.

As of right now, the list is for HCV only.

The update, purge and removal, it's changed just a little bit.

It's not really drastic.

In the past, every 12 months, our policy said that we would purge the wait list by sending out the purge notices and requiring the family to send it back to us.

Now we will just purge our list as needed to ensure that all applicant and applicant information is current in the family.

If we're in a stalemate, we've used all our money.

Nobody's moving around in the program.

We wouldn't bug the participants every 12 months to update that information.

If we're in a hot time like we are right now, where we are, you know, leasing up like crazy, then it might be that we purge that list a little more often.

The family fails to respond within 15 business days.

They will be removed from the wait list without further notice.

If the notice is returned from the post office as no longer at that address with an affording address, then they'll be removed from the wait list with no notice.

If the notice is returned from the post office with affording address, we would resend that notice to the address indicated to us.

That one's new before it would fall under the two previous, and then we would allow them the 15 business days from the date the letter was resent.

And then if by chance the family's removed from the wait list for failure to respond, but we determined that it was an admin error inside CRHA, then we would reinstate the family and make sure that they're brought up to date on the wait list.

The voucher briefing, this has not changed either.

The voucher briefing has a long set of

Items that have to be provided to the participant during the briefing session.

None of that has changed.

I think maybe there's some additional VAWA forms that will go out.

Well, they've been going out, but they'll go out as part of our new briefing packet as well.

The briefing packet does outline the family's obligations, which are detailed on the voucher form itself.

So if anybody's ever interested in those, I can gladly send you a copy of the vouchers so that you can read through those.

And then the big key change for this chapter would be our subsidy standards.

The subsidy standards are known as the size of the voucher or the size of the household that the individual gets support from.

So previously CRHA was issuing a bedroom size per head of household, a bedroom size per

Children of different sex, children of different generations, different generations as a whole, whether it be children or other household members.

And this has not been viable to the program.

This has created very large unit sizes with very large HAP payments.

And our ACC utilization has been in the low 200s, but yet we're maxing out

the subsidy that HUD has given us.

So as part of our action plan with HUD, one was revamping our admin plan and the other was revamping our subsidy standard.

The HUD regulations in regard to subsidy standards say they can be as strict as two people per sleeping room, no matter age, sex, relationship, and even a living room is considered a sleeping room.

That means a two person household could have a zero bedroom subsidy.

We're not gonna go that stringent.

That's just not fair.

But we are tightening it down to where it's one bedroom per head of household, which would include spouse or co-head and then one bedroom per two persons within the household.

So this will allow us to be able to use the half subsidy dollars that we're receiving to assist a greater number of individuals in our community versus fewer numbers of individuals being assisted and utilizing the full dollars that we're receiving.

The vouchers, this hasn't changed a whole lot.

The vouchers now are currently being issued for 60 days.

That gives them 60 days to seek a place to reside and turn in a request for tenancy approval.

We are currently already providing extensions to those up to another additional 60 days.

Now CRHA will automatically approve two 30 days extensions upon rent request.

So at the end of their 60 days, if they have not had success,

and Leasing Up, they provide us written notice that they need an extension.

We'll grant 30 days at a time for two more times.

At the end of that, we can still approve additional extensions, but it would kind of be like unemployment where you have to provide that you're seeking, actively seeking your housing or provide us with what obstacles have been in your way that you've not been able to seek housing.

And the,

Additional requests beyond that 120 days, we will require the family to provide documentation to support why that additional time is needed.

Mr.

Sales and I did kind of a tally on the most recent lease up that we did.

And now it's 133 vouchers that we issued.

It's looking about 75, 76 day average from the date of issuance to the date of lease signage.

and you know, 120 days.

If we can do that during a pandemic, I'm hoping that we can do that outside of a pandemic.

But the caveat still there that we can provide additional should there be an obstacle that is preventing them from finding housing in the 120 days that it's given.

The income and subsidy determinations.

So the HUD regulations specify that income sources from the household

means all monies that go into the household on behalf of the family based on an annual 12 month period.

So if somebody is employed for 12 months, we calculate their anticipated annual income on the income they anticipate earning during that 12 months.

There is a lot of our participants who work airmark and they're off two weeks here, two weeks here.

Some of them are off two months at a time.

So they will have the option to decide whether they want their

10 month income calculated as their rent, but spread over the 12 month period.

So they have a smaller rent to pay during that time, or they can choose to do they're anticipating their annual income at 10 months of $12 an hour, 40 hours a week that can be broke over the 10 months.

And then they can have their two months without rent to pay other than the minimum rent at that time.

The annual income, you know, it means all income sources that are derived within a 12 month period time.

It can include assets.

It can include family members who are monthly providing income to another family member to be able to pay their monthly expenses.

And then their adjusted income would be that annual income

minus the established HUD regulations that require CRHA to subtract five mandatory deductions if the family qualifies for them.

So if a family has minor children, each one of those minor children would have a $480 a year deduction taken off that annual income.

If that family would have an adult disabled child, that child is still considered a dependent, so they would still get that 480 off.

If there's an elderly or disabled family, there's a $400 deduction that comes off that annual income.

If there's an elderly or disabled family and they have medical expenses that exceed the sum of 3% of their annual income, that unreimbursed medical expense would then come off of their annual income.

And then if there's a disability expense for a disabled family for attendant care or auxiliary apparatuses, that would enable a family member to work.

and then those deductions can be taken off of that annual income as well.

And then childcare expenses, reasonable within the limits of childcare expenses for the locality.

So it's usually based off of what social services would pay and they cannot exceed the annual income earnings.

The same with the disability apparatus expenses.

Those cannot exceed the earnings.

That would become your adjusted annual income.

And then that is used to calculate what the family share of rent would be by calculating that against a utility allowance that is provided to the family based on the utilities that they would be responsible for paying.

And then that subsidy standard, according to that bedroom size that we had just talked about.

And I'm sorry, I know this was probably put in half a yard.

The HUD,

HUD requires that we have a minimum rent.

CRHA has established theirs at 35%, I'm sorry, $35.

So the family would pay either the highest of 30% of their monthly adjusted income or 10% of their monthly gross income or that minimum rent.

The family, if they pay utilities out of pocket, we do calculate a utility allowance based on what utilities they pay, what type of

Housing Unit is an apartment is at a single family home.

And then we add that utility allowance to the rent the landlord is asking for the property they're going to reside in to get their gross rent.

That gross rent is subtracted from that payment standard.

And if there's any overage that is added to 30% of their income, and if they do not, they cannot exceed the 40% of their income or they would not qualify for the property that they're looking for.

The HAP, the housing assistance payment is the portion that CRHA is gonna pay directly to the landlord.

And then the tenant portion is what they are gonna pay to the landlord.

The gross rent for the family's unit minus what that tenant portion is, is how we come to the HAP.

The subsidy for the family, if it exceeds

The rent to owner then CRHA does pay the family a utility reimbursement.

The payment standards are based off of that subsidy standard that we talked about.

The payment standards defined as the maximum monthly assistant payment for a family assisted in the voucher program.

The payment standard is the lower of either the payment standard for the family unit size, which is that subsidy standard, the number of bedrooms they qualify for,

or the payment standard of the actual size of the dwelling unit.

So if somebody has a three bedroom subsidy and they choose a two bedroom unit, then their rent would be calculated on the two bedroom payment standard instead of the three that they would qualify for if they had rented a three bedroom unit.

CRHA requires to pay a monthly housing assistant payment for the family.

That is the lower of either the payment standard for the family minus their portion or the gross rent for the family minus

families unit minus their portion.

The family unit size increases or decreases during the HAP term.

The family's unit size must be used to determine the new payment standard for the family beginning at their first annual re-exam.

So if someone leaves the household and they no longer qualify for that three bedroom standard at their next re-exam, we would lower them to the two bedroom standard.

This chapter hasn't changed at all HUD provided

all housing authorities with the EIV, which is enterprise income verification.

EIV is a website that compiles all earnings reported to social security administration, all social security benefits, unemployment benefits.

And by the information that we send to HUD monthly on our reporting, they know who resides in our jurisdiction and they provide us with this EIV.

EIV is always the top of the hierarchy for verifications.

And with that, we're supposed to compare it to the other incomes or the other verifications of income that the participants provide to us.

The participant can provide a third party doc, which would be a pay stub or a letter of hire or a letter of termination.

If they don't have that information, then we can send a verification that the participant signs to whoever needs to verify for them.

If we can't get that back, then we can call and say, hey, we've been trying to get this.

Can you just give me this information and do a third party oral verification?

And if all of the above fails, then we can do a tenant certified declaration to get the information that we need to verify income and assets and expenses.

Chapter eight talks about the housing quality standards.

There has been some pretty,

Big changes for CRHA in this one.

The housing quality standards is the inspection process of the unit that is being assisted through our program.

There are multiple types of inspections that can take place in that unit.

HUD requires that every unit entering into the HCV program have an initial inspection.

The initial inspection makes sure that the unit that they're moving into is the requirements of the assistance sanitary.

That's also used for rent reasonableness that we'll talk about here in a few minutes.

In the past, our policies have said that we are going to install HTV units on an annual basis.

It's been several years ago that HUD has given the housing authorities permission to move those annual inspections, biennial inspections.

So CRHA is going to adopt this moving forward.

and all of our HCV units will be inspected on a 24 month basis unless one happens to fail due to a health and safety issue and then that owner will be put on a 12 month inspection process until we no longer see those types of problems.

That sounds scary to some of you, I'm sure, but however, the participant or the owner can request a special inspection

If there is something going on in the unit and the owner's not addressing it and the participant asks for our assistance, we will do a special inspection.

And the same for the owner.

If the owner calls and says, hey, this is going on in my unit, could you come do an inspection on it to help me enforce that part of the program?

Then we would do that as well.

And then the program is required to do an annual reporting to HUD, the CMAP, the Section 8 Assessment Management Program,

And in that, there has to be a quality control while the HQS inspection, not all of them, a percentage of HQS inspections that have happened throughout the year.

So CRHA has several certified inspectors.

If they go out and do an inspection, 3% of those inspections have to be quality controlled.

They have to be quality controlled within three months of that initial inspection happening.

And then those measures are taken to make sure A,

The inspectors are doing what they need to.

The inspections are in compliance with HQS.

And then we report to HUD that, yes, we are doing what we need to in regards to HQS process and that the units that we're leasing up are decent, safe, and sanitary.

No HAP contract can be approved without a rent reasonableness being done on the unit.

So what rent reasonableness is, is ensuring that property owners and landlords are not charged more for an assistant unit because they know the government's paying the bill for it.

It's making sure that when they provide us with a request for tenancy approval, saying it's a three bedroom unit with two baths and, you know, brand new carpeting or brand new flooring and things like that, that they are,

The rent that they're asking for it because they're saying those things are there are actually there.

Part of the HQS process is to make notation.

Does it have the new flooring?

Does it have three bedrooms?

Does it have two baths?

Does it have updated appliances?

You know, they're saying that the tenant is not responsible for paying for the stove and refrigerator is the stove and refrigerator in the unit.

So CRHA has not been successful with rent reasonableness for quite some time.

The old process used to be a survey would go out to the area landlords asking them to take time out of their busy schedule to provide us information on other properties that they own that's not receiving assistance.

And that data is pretty entailed.

Like we need to know the location, what demographics within the community, the quality of your property, how many bedroom sizes, what type of unit is it?

How old is it?

Do you offer any amenities?

Are there any housing services?

Do you provide onsite, offsite maintenance?

Are there any utilities you provide?

The owners have never really been responsive in sending that information back when we attempted to receive it, so we can never build our internal database.

There were a couple of websites that were used for a while, but you know, HUD said, no, we need a little more detailed information.

So CRHA has contracted with Nellrod and purchased their Easy Rent Reasonableness system.

With this system, Nellrod

took care of all of the surveys.

They collected all the data that we needed.

They hit all those key factors that are required.

This is also a requirement for CMAP.

They hit all those key factors that are needed so that we can be in compliance with this requirement from HUD.

And it's a very easy software to use, and we have found it very beneficial since we started using it.

So we have made sure that this information is in the policy for when it's adopted, that this is how the rent reasonableness will be determined moving forward.

Could I ask two quick questions before I...

Most definitely.

So the students, do they have to be city residents before they apply, or can they just come in?

We will accept applications from anybody who puts in an application.

They will not get the local preference if they are not residing in the city of Charlottesville when they apply.

And one of the student requirements is if they don't meet the Department of Education's

Independent student criteria, then they have to have established residency for a year on their own.

Okay.

Sorry.

You got my email.

Don't hesitate to shoot me it now.

I'll answer it for you.

The lease contract, this area has not changed a whole lot.

The leasing up of the program remains the same.

The participants are given a bunch of information in the briefing.

One of the items that, go ahead.

Families who are having difficulties, you know, getting apartments for their vouchers, do we keep

That information, like are there any statistics?

Is it regarding whether discriminatory practices are happening or do once they, it doesn't, once they're not able to lease up, then we just move on.

We are.

I mean, if anybody, one of the things they're given in their briefing packet is all of the fair housing information, how to make a complaint, things like that.

If they contact us and say,

You know, anything that leads us to believe that there's a discriminatory action going on, we do not hesitate to provide them with legal aids information so that they can step in on their behalf.

Virginia law in July passed some legislation to where properties can no longer say we don't accept section eight.

As long as the participant meets the qualifications that anybody else would meet, then they have to accept the section eight.

That's not been the practice for forever.

and it went even further to say if they don't have the income, like say it's one of those properties where you have to make 3.5% or 3.5 times your rental amount and income in order to qualify, they have to utilize whatever portion of the HAP that we're gonna pay as qualified income.

So I can tell you from 2016 to 18 when I was here, we did see a lot of people struggle to find a place to lease.

We do have a lot of participants

in the community tax credit properties because they met those criteria or they wouldn't have met our criteria.

But since this new law has taken place, we are seeing a great diversity of where individuals are leasing up and we're not seeing much issue with people being able to lease up.

The biggest thing we do here is they don't have the credit

or you know somebody with absolutely no income even with the hat portion don't meet the income requirements for some some landlords but I feel we've had a great success with this most recently so the numbers I provided Mr.

Sales today said we issued like 133 vouchers and so far only 20 some of those have expired and we have leased up right at 70 of them and we have like 13 more in the process of leasing up right now so

Plus I'll add one more to that.

So we're working with Todd Niemeyer from the Human Rights Commission to address any issues we do have, because we have had some source of income issues already with two individuals and one more recently that I found out about yesterday.

Okay.

with Todd.

So we are addressing those with legal aid and working with them whenever possible.

And the last two have both been satisfactory decisions for the individual with the voucher.

So back to the general leasing.

In the briefing, the participants are given a lot of information.

One of the things that they are provided with is the request for tenancy approval.

That's the form they give to the landlord when they find a place that they're interested in.

That request gets filled out by the landlord.

It has to be signed by both the landlord and the participant and come back to us.

And that's where we start the process of leasing them up.

One of the things HUD says that we have discretion on is that we can provide the owners screening information about the participants.

CRHA will not do that.

And that's not something that we'll participate in.

We do encourage the landlords to do for our participants as they would everybody else in the community.

And like I said, those new laws have really helped those seeking to use a housing choice voucher to find

housing that they normally wouldn't be able to.

The request for tenancy approval must match all of the information provided to us on the lease.

It must say the same amount of rents, the same utility responsibility.

We'll look at the lease to make sure that it lists the same household members that we have.

We will

make sure that the rent reasonableness data can be collected based on what they tell us on that rent request for tenancy approval.

And then that starts the process for the inspection.

And then from there we go into the housing assistance payment contract.

One thing we hear a lot is where's my application to be an owner.

So the housing authorities don't take applications for owners.

We do make sure that they're not somebody who

may have been on a list that basically was a slumlord and we decided not to do business with them any further or someone who knew someone moved out of their property didn't inform us and collected a bunch of money that we had to work to recapture.

But in the long scheme of things, we will make sure that you own the property by deed or personal property taxes.

We will make sure that you provide us with a W-9 for tax purposes and then proof that you do have insurance on that property.

Each lease that comes to us, the owners have to attach the HUD provided tenancy addendum.

So the tenancy addendum basically outlines those tenant responsibilities, the same ones that are the family obligations on the voucher.

There is a requirement that for the first year, or for every new lease, there has to be a 12 month

initial lease term.

It can be greater than 12 months, but it has to be at least 12 months.

And during that initial 12 months, the owner cannot raise the rent.

Now say we get a tenancy request for tenancy approval in that does not have that the participant won't qualify for that rental amount under their subsidies and their income.

We do go to bat at that point in time for the participant and we will have discussions with that owner

to see if there's a potential of bringing that rent down where it needs to be for them to qualify or if maybe there's a different unit in the same community that might rent for a little bit less.

We see that a lot with some of the newer properties.

We've been very successful with that with this new lease up as well.

We make sure that the owner is aware that they cannot charge any more for security positive for our participant than they would other participants and that they stay within the

Virginia Law, which is no more than two times the rent.

We make sure that the owner is aware that they cannot charge any fees or anything outside of what's in that original lease.

There can be no separate non-lease agreements between them.

If the owner tells us that the tenant's responsible for this utility, this utility, and this utility, then they can't turn around and charge them for something different in the lease terms.

While we review the lease for those consistencies,

We do not review the lease to make sure it's in compliance with state and local law.

If we see something funny, obviously, if it's something that's just totally off from a normal lease contract or something, we may look into it a little bit more, but we can't make those legal determinations, rather the lease is applicable.

We would refer someone out to Legal Aid if they felt or we felt that it needed to have a second set of eyes.

The HAP contract will be executed once the HQS is done.

We've determined the rent responsibility.

We've received the completed and executed lease.

And that HAP contract has to be signed by both CRHA and the owner agent in order for payments to go out.

The owner agent can stall that up to 60 days, but we won't pay the housing system

payment up until we have that signature.

If they stall it past 60 days, then we do have the right to tell them that we're withdrawing the voucher and we're going to assist the participant to find additional housing.

And that would be one of those situations where we would definitely extend the voucher because they had provided what they needed to and it wasn't their fault.

They're in the situation right now.

No rent creases, I think I've already said this, will be permitted in that first term.

If they wish to have rent increases after that first term, they need to let CRHA know 60 days in advance of when they want that to be increased.

We will start the whole process over with the rent reasonableness to make sure that they're not asking for a larger increase than they qualify for.

And we would notify the owner within 10 business days of whether we approved or denied their request.

Could I ask you a quick question?

Most definitely.

Back to Chapter 9, something you had said.

No.

So we don't have the landlord fill out any type of application, and we don't

approve them to be a landlord, so to speak.

We do make sure that they provide us proof of ownership for the property.

They have to provide us a W-9 for tax purposes, because we will report that we paid this person this amount of money for the year.

So what if that property, and I've seen this time and time and time again, is

An illegal dwelling.

Meaning?

Well, so right now you're going through the city and that's where we're leasing out.

That's what I heard earlier.

But you're looking at having an MOU from other localities.

Other localities have different zoning regulations than these.

So I would say that we probably should check to make sure that their zoning is in, that this is illegal.

Dwelling Unit in the home or next to the home or to the rear of the home.

But you don't check with any other, especially again, if you're going to have memoranda to understand so that localities, every locality has different zoning regulations and different zoning laws.

I've worked, I personally, with my day job have worked with several homeowners who have illegal dwellings on their property.

Their property is not zoned for what they're doing.

And we've had to find other locations for folks to rent.

There's an example where I may have turned my basement into an apartment without the proper permits and without making sure it complies with zoning.

So the proof of ownership is either a deed or personal property taxes.

And then when we do the inspections, there's very set guidelines that would approve or deny.

So if you're saying that you've turned the basement into an apartment and there's no segregation between your upstairs and your downstairs, like under the HQS, they have to have their own interest in the exit.

They can't go through anybody else's dwelling area.

They have to have their own kitchen area, their own bathroom area.

Zoning and building are two different things.

Okay.

So you can't go by the zone, you can't look at this and go by a

Do you have any idea what I'm talking about here?

I mean, I do, but I think there's enough governance in the HQS and the approval of tenancy part that it would catch if someone was illegally renting out just part of their own personal home.

Well, I tell you what, why don't you and I sit outside sometime so that we can go through those areas and it might make it a little more understandable.

For both of us.

For both of us, yes.

Absolutely.

You shoot me an email and we'll set up time to do that.

Absolutely.

Perfect.

So we were talking about moves.

Participants are allowed to move with continued assistance.

into additional continued assistance units.

The family has the right to terminate a lease per the lease agreement.

And, you know, the lease says 60 day notice to vacate at the end of the lease terms, you know, the owner accepts it, then that would be termination by the family.

And then the owner has that right as well.

The owners at the end of the lease agreement, they say, we're not gonna renew.

Not at no fault of the tenant, the tenants given permission to move with continued assistance.

The owner gives the family a notice to vacate or commence actions of eviction or has obtained court judgment or other processes.

This one gets a little bit murky because later on in terminations it talks about this a little bit further.

But if the eviction is due to some reason other than a violation of the program, then we would provide the participant a new voucher to seek additional housing.

Obviously the VAWA, we've talked about that quite a bit so far.

If there's a risk of health or safety due to domestic or dating violence, sexual assault or stalking, then we would assist the family in moving from the area in which they reside.

If we as CRHA terminate the HAP contract because there's been a breach from the owner, then we're going to assist the family with moving to a different unit.

And then if the family's unit doesn't meet HQSA standards, they've increased their family size or

something along those lines then we would again issue them a voucher to seek.

We would deny a move if we were in a position where we were not receiving enough funding to cover our current expenses and that move would increase the housing assistance payment that would include both residing in the jurisdiction and moving out of the jurisdiction under portability.

And then of course we would deny the families

Move with continued assistance if the family was in termination status for an action that was against the family obligation.

We will not allow the family to move within the first initial year.

And we will not allow the family to move more than once in a 12 month period.

Unless again, it's one of those reasons that's outside their control.

And we've kind of already talked about this every year.

Every 12 months, the participants are required to do an annual reexamination.

The participants also have the right to seek an interim reexamination for change of household or income composition, household composition or family income.

And then we would recalculate the family share and subsidy amount according to either one of those.

The annual reexamination, this one's a little bit different.

HUD is allowing more and more streamlining

for income that is of a consistent source, SSI, Social Security, annuities, things that only increase every year based on the COLAs.

If a family has 90% or more of their income coming from a fixed source, then we just need to verify the, we're not required to verify the non-fixed, if there's a percentage of non-fixed income in the household, we just do what we need to with that COLA

rate increase and proceed forward.

If the family has less than 90% of their income coming from a fixed source, then we can streamline the process of verifying that fixed income, but we must verify the non-fixed income.

The goal is to schedule annual re-examination 120 days prior to their anniversary date.

The anniversary date is either going to be the effective date of their move in or their last annual re-examination.

If a family moves, changes units, then that will become their new anniversary date and will recertify at that point.

If the family has changes in circumstances between their annuals where their income decreases or their family size changes, then they must report that to CRHA within 10 days of that change.

They're not requested to get our permission, of course, if they've had a baby, adopted a baby, or have been awarded custody of a child through the courts, but they must request our permission prior to adding a new family member that's a live-in aide, a foster child, a foster adult, or just someone else who is expected to stay in the unit for more than 14 consecutive days or 45 cumulative days in a 12 month period.

If someone leaves the household,

They need to notify CRHA immediately because the household subsidy is based on the number of people who reside in that household.

Changes affecting income or expenses.

If the family household has a change in income or expenses, they need to report it.

If they report it and there's not, I think we've made a new policy to say if there is $500 or more income increase,

to complete an interim change increasing the tenants portion of rent.

If it's less than $500 a month, we are gonna note the file that they have done what they were supposed to.

They notified us of the change of household income and there's no actions that we will take.

If of course we already spoke about if somebody moves in or out of the household, then we need to know that.

The family may initiate interim if their income decreases and CRHA must process

A rent change to capture that decreased income so that their rent portion decreases as well.

If the family can notify us either verbally or in writing, if they provide us a verbal notice, we will follow up with the required forms that we need to be in audit compliance.

The family share and subsidy is based off of, as we call it, the payment standards, the income, the payment standards,

are based off of how many people are in the household, what subsidy standard did we give them?

And of course the utility allowances that go into that calculation as well.

If the subsidy standards or the payment standards change, there's a methodology in which we change the household income based on those.

So if the payment standards increase, they'll be applied at the first annual reexamination after that increase.

That will benefit the participant because if the payment standard increases, most likely their portion of rent will decrease.

If the payment standard is decreased during the terms of the HAP contract, the decreased payment standard will not be applied until the second annual reexamination.

Because the decreased payment standard most likely is going to increase the tenant's portion of rent.

With the subsidy standard, if the family unit size changes, if someone leaves or comes into the household,

and the subsidy standard changes, the change will be made to determine the payment standard at the family's first annual reexamination.

This is gonna apply to all of our participants now.

Once this is adopted, our subsidy standards will change.

So at the family's first annual reexamination, we will be changing

the subsidy standards for those who need it changed.

Not everybody will change at their first annual re-examination to meet the family size and the subsidy standard that they qualify for under this policy.

We will notify the family.

This is a little bit different.

So this policy is saying that we're going to notify the family in writing and that notification is going to break down what their

How their assistance payment was calculated.

What was their annual income?

What was their adjusted annual income?

What's the portion of rent that the housing authority is gonna pay?

What's the portion of rent they're gonna pay?

Previously, we were just providing them with, this is your change effect of this date.

This is what we're gonna pay.

This is what you're gonna pay.

But this one's a lot better because it's gonna explain to them where those income amounts came from.

and our software just went through an update and it provides us a really wonderful form.

So it also takes away the potential for error for creating Word documents every time we do a rent change.

All of our notices will say that they have the right of an explanation of how that was calculated.

And if they disagree, they have the right to an informal hearing.

Termination of assistance.

So the same with the applicant portion of it.

HUD requires certain things have to be terminated.

They give us approaches to terminate an assistance by evaluating decisions of whether to terminate due to actions or inactions of family members.

And then alternatives that we can consider in lieu of termination and criteria that will be used when deciding what actions to take.

HUD policies that govern the owner's right to termination of assistance play into this as well.

So not only are the tenants held to a criteria, so are the owners.

So if at any time the owner violates their agreements within the HAP contract, then CRHA can terminate the owner's rights as well.

HUD requires us to terminate assistance if the family no longer requires assistance.

So a few slides back, I had mentioned that the income counts when you come in and we don't really

counted again for qualifications to the program but that's not the case in my opinion because if someone increases their income they become self-sufficient and we're no longer paying an assistance payment for them then they can they can stay a voucher holder for 180 days without CRHA making a payment for them they're paying all of their rent at the end of that 180 days if they've not had any

changing income circumstances to where CRHA starts paying for them again, then they would no longer be a voucher holder.

So they have reached the point of self-sufficiency.

We've not had to make a payment for them for six months and they are self-sufficient enough to leave the program.

CRHA would terminate the system if the family requested that we do so.

If the family is evicted from the assisted unit for serious or repeat lease violations,

If the family at any time refuses to provide any of the consent forms that they are required to do so under the federal regulations, if the family refuses to provide documentation of citizenship within the required timeframes, if they fail to disclose or provide documentation of social security numbers, if there's ever a manufacturing or production of methamphetamines on federally assisted housing,

if they are subject to the Lifetime Sex Offender Registry, or of course, if there's only a one person household and they have expired.

Had mandatory terminations are pretty much the exact same as the denial of admission, engaging in illegal use of drugs, have a pattern of illegal drug use that interferes with the health, safety, and right and peaceful enjoyment

the other residents, if they have an abuse or pattern abuse of alcohol that threatens the health, safety, and rights, if they violated any of the family obligations to not engage in drug-related criminal activity, or if they violate the family obligations to not engage in violent criminal activity.

HUD permits CRHA to terminate assistance under certain other circumstances, the discretion's left up to us, and it warrants consideration of determination

If the family fails to comply with the family obligations under the program, the family member has been evicted from federally assisted housing in the last five years.

These are the CRHA policies.

I'm sorry, I forgot to say that.

The family member has committed fraud, robbery, or other corrupt or criminal acts in connection with federal housing programs.

The family currently owes rent to other PHAs in connection with the CHA, I'm sorry, with the Section 8 Program or Public Housing Assistance Act.

The family's not reimbursed any PHA for amounts.

And I think that's supposed to say they owe PHAs.

So if they owe another housing authority money that was due under a HAP contract for damages of the unit or overpayment of subsidy or another violation in which the HAP payment was paid and it shouldn't have been, then they need to set up payment plans with that PHA.

And if they breach the terms of that repayment agreement

with them or if they're in one with CRHA and breach agreements.

If they engage in threatening or violent or abusive behavior towards CRHA staff or if they are absent from their assisted unit for a period of 180 days or greater.

Again, we will use evidence of the preponderance of evidence that indicates that the household member has engaged in activities

This says whether they've been arrested or convicted, but we kind of talked about that before.

We'll consider the seriousness of the case, especially with the respect of how it's going to affect other residents, safety or property, and how it's going to affect other members of the family who were not involved in the actions of the failure to act.

The extent of participation of other individuals in the family, the length of time since the violation occurred, and the recent history and likelihood of favorable conduct in the future.

Evidence of criminal conduct will be considered if it indicates a demonstrable risk of safety to property.

Record of arrest will not be used as the sole basis of any termination.

It could trigger an investigation into that.

And of course, when it comes to VAWA, the protections against termination, there's four specific protections against termination for victims under

domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault.

So we've talked a little bit about the owners.

They are in a contractual obligation to the housing authority, which is the HAP contract.

They are responsible for, you know, making sure that they uphold their end of the lease, just like we're asking the participants to.

They cannot have any

There are other restrictions that says board members or other people within the community that would have ties to the CRHA program cannot be the assistant landlords.

CRJ is trying really hard to build a landlord pool beyond just the ones that, you know, tend to house the most of our participants.

I always sell the HTV program as an insurance policy for landlords.

And especially with COVID, like so many people lost their income and they didn't have the program to fall back onto to make sure that their rent was paid.

So, I mean, landlords would be

So much better off if they were participating in this program because they have an insurance policy that if income goes away, there's still going to be payments of rent made to them.

And you know, it's an extra set of eyes to help make sure that their lease agreements are being followed and that their properties are being taken care of.

And you know, like I said before, it's also a protection policy for the tenants because they have CRH to make sure the landlords are doing what they promised to in the lease.

and that they're taking care of the properties.

So we're gonna work to build a landlord recruitment program.

I have started with the last couple of months, rent, half payments that have gone out, including mail-ins and with the checks to ensure that the landlords are getting them.

I'm gonna continue doing that each month to promote for the landlords that we already have.

But I also wanna build a database of landlords that we're not currently working with.

introduce them to the program and bring them to our side of the world.

The goal is to hold some recruitments.

This talks about what CRHA's responsibilities are to ensure that the funds that we receive from HUD are spent and utilized within our regulations and what our policy says and that there's not errors that are costing the agency more money than they should and that if there's any complaints of fraud or things that they're being investigated.

The part has not changed much.

It still talks about all of the things that CRHA needs to do to ensure that the program is running at full speed at the safest and most effective way that it can.

And our annual CMAP requires a lot of quality control of everything that's done.

And so that will help detect the errors and the program abuse and things like that to make sure that we can utilize our

top dollar to help the most people.

We will investigate any type of complaints that come to us for abuse or fraud from the program, but it's gonna have to take more than just, hey, she's doing this.

There needs to be some viable information in order to warrant us going to that point.

We're not gonna just harass people because he said, she said.

There's special types of housing that can be put into the program.

Before it used to be just single family homes, apartments, town homes, manufactured homes, but they have expanded out some to provide like congregate housing.

I think we have a couple of participants who are living in an assisted living type facility.

I don't think we have many manufacturer homes.

That's not something that I see in this area much, but when I worked on the Stanton side of the mountain, we did have several manufacturer homes and there's some shared homes and other options.

We do have several single room occupancy vouchers at the crossings.

This is my favorite chapter.

That cartoon says it all.

What are our ambitions?

Our ambitions is to streamline our processes so that we're running like a well-oiled machine and we're not always chasing our tails.

And we have more money to do the things that we need to do with the extra time that we have to continue building this program.

And the administration of the program is huge.

It's not as easy as issuing vouchers and changing rents and proceeding to do this on repeat.

There are a lot of financial aspects to the HCV program that has to be monitored.

I swear right now I feel like we're doing it on a daily basis.

The subsidy standards, the payment standards, they are issued by HUD once a year based on the area averages of rentals in the market.

So those have to be updated annually.

Our utility allowance schedules were adopted, the HDAs,

So they update theirs on July.

We have to update those annually.

So that has to be established into the program and utilized and calculated at the right times and correctly.

Obviously we have informal reviews and hearings that happen quite often.

We have to monitor, have there been any overpayments to families or owners on behalf of families?

Either either the family or the owner were overpayments or due back from one or the other.

We owe more money to someone because something wasn't calculated correctly.

The CMAP is the annual audit process, but it literally happens every single month.

There are aspects of this that has to be captured on a monthly basis and reported at the end of the year.

This is kind of what scores the Section 8 program in HUD's eyes to see if it's a viable program or not.

The record keeping is intense with any of the HUD programs.

It goes even further to where we have to request information from the Department of Health on anybody who has had elevated blood levels to make sure none of them are CRHA HTV participants.

And we have to report that to HUD.

We always have to monitor our dollars to make sure we're not in a position of shortfall, that we have enough money coming in.

to continue issuing vouchers or continue assisting those vouchers that are already in place.

And then of course the Violence Against Women Act, we've talked about this many times.

It's really intensified to make sure that there are protections out there for individuals who need it.

Informal reviews and informal hearings are two different things.

Informal reviews are granted to applicants.

provides them the right to appeal decisions that are made from the agency.

There are some areas that they don't get to appeal.

They don't get to the appeal if the family, for our ruling of the family unit size, if it's an accordance or subsidy standard, they don't get to appeal if we refuse to grant an extension of their voucher.

They don't get to appeal if we,

don't grant approval for tenancy and that would be probably because of either the 30-40% rule it's not affordable and HUD won't allow us to do it or the unit itself has HQS deficiencies and it's not safety or sanitary or if we determine that the unit size is not acceptable within those HQS requirements due to the family size and composition.

Pretty much anything else they can ask for review on.

It must be made in writing and delivered to CRHA either in person or by mail.

Within 10 business days from the date of the letter of denial of assistance, we will schedule and send written notice of the informal review within 10 business days of the family's request.

Informal hearing is for participants.

It has the same cans and can'ts.

We must provide a participant the opportunity to in a formal hearing

in the determination basis of their annual income or adjusted income, in determination of the appropriate utility allowance for tenant paid utilities, in determination of the unit size in accordance with the subsidy standard, if we terminate their assistance due to family actions or inactions, if we terminate assistance due to being absent from the unit for greater than 180 days, or if we terminate the family's family self-sufficiency account,

With the informal hearing, it has to again be made in written requests delivered to the Housing Authority either by hand or first-class mail within 10 business days of the Notice of Termination.

We must in turn schedule the meeting with them within 10 days of receiving the request.

Participants and CRHA are permitted to pre-hearing discovery rights, meaning if

We're terminating for a reason.

They get to examine any documentation regarding that.

And the same, you know, if they have something that they are saying it was done incorrectly for, we can ask for copies of that to review prior to the hearing.

At the family's expense, they may have a legal representation and at their expense too, they can request copies of anything and everything that's in their file.

I believe the policy says it's like 25 cent per page over so many pages.

The informal hearing can be conducted by any person approved by CRHA other than person who made the decision to terminate or their subordinate.

The person conducting the hearing must issue a written decision, briefly stating the reason for the decision, any factual determinations relating to the decision, and the hearing officer must mail the notice of hearing decision to the participant on the same day.

as well as to CRHA.

The executive director does have the authority to overturn the hearing officer's decision if the decision exceeded the authority of the hearing officer or the decision conflicted with HUD regulations requirements or is otherwise contrary to federal, state or local laws.

VAWA, it was initiated in 2013.

It has gained speed expeditiously over the past couple of years.

CRHA will make every effort to make sure that every participant and every landlord is aware of the VAWA protections that are in place for HCD participants.

We will be posting in the office all of these notifications that you see

on the screen, and then we also provide owners and managers information about the rights and obligations of the participants under FALWA.

We will do it at the beginning of participation and annually after that.

We have, in the policy, we have a list of community partners that if we believe that there's an instance of any type of domestic violence that we will, with the participants' permission,

refer them to seek assistance and we will continue to grow community partnerships with different entities in the community that would be able to help family members who are in one of these situations.

This is our last chapter.

I did not put anything together for it because these vouchers are not something that we're focusing on right now.

We will be focusing on them as we start to ramp up our redevelopment and put them into play.

But there is some likelihood that parts of this chapter will come back to the board for further approval as we get a little more into the project-based voucher world.

Everything in this part right now is based off of Safe Harbor.

And since we're not utilizing project-based vouchers at the moment,

There may be some key demographic or jurisdictional or even clientele areas that we need to tweak when it comes to the CRHA policy part.

So I just didn't put anything together with this one yet because I don't know a whole lot about project based vouchers.

We're all learning this one together.

So that is my presentation.

I will gladly answer any questions that anybody has.

And like I told Lisa, I am more than available to any of you if you want to have some one-on-one conversations to further explain how the HCV program works.

So I have a question.

I was really eager to hear about the shared housing options in part because I think that shared housing seems like a really good way to increase affordability.

But also I know that there are a number of people who are just single occupants who aren't necessarily looking for an entire unit themselves.

I would gladly like to look into that a little bit more myself.

That's not something that we have ever dealt with.

I think it's more of a new rollout when it comes to the type of housing that HUD allows.

But I will gladly do a sidebar with you and we can learn that one together.

Great.

Thank you.

I probably should be in that conversation as well.

Probably so.

I just don't want to get people thinking they're going to live in a house and then... Oh no, I'm with you.

And I can just tell you right now some of the localities that I've worked with

The definition of family is different than what HUD's new definition of family is.

And so you have to be careful of that too.

You know, I accept that the legality needs to be a minimum standard, certainly.

But I also, you know, in the market that we're in, I would like to be, you know, aggressive about finding

Available housing situations for people in need.

I agree.

And that's one of the aspects of the landlord outreach.

You know, I want to see what's in our market, what's out there that we may not be even aware of out there.

and with these new housing types as well, there might be things that people thought, well, this isn't gonna work, but now under these new rules, it may.

Yeah, back to the co-housing point, there's a lot of seniors that are really kind of overhoused, so some kind of,

I agree with you.

Any other questions I can answer right now?

All right, thank you.

A little bit, yeah.

I don't think I have much to point to.

I've only practiced just like five times a day because I am not a very confident public speaker.

You did a great job.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, it's a long one.

Yeah, Mr.

Yeah, thank you, that was awesome.

You're welcome.

Does everyone need a brief, Mr.

Sales, I have a question for you.

I'm thinking maybe we should take, it's been what, an hour and 45 minutes, take a brief break.

How much, I'm just looking ahead here

Well, I think today is supposed to be a very brief discussion.

Oh, okay, okay.

Can we ask overall questions?

Of course.

Well, I've got several, sorry.

So are we gonna get a hard copy of this document at some point?

And possibly a copy of that presentation.

Cause I do think it's good to have that information.

They wouldn't have to know everything that's an admin plan.

We work with them through what information is needed during the briefing and that normally takes a couple hours.

Our admin plan is on our website as well and it has been

for at least the last 45 days for individuals to access.

And once it is approved, or if it is not approved, but once it is approved by the board, it will permanently be housed on our website.

Are there like, and again, excuse me for being so new.

Are there like,

Tenant liaisons or something to help.

Yeah, so we have two housing

HCV specialists that assist the individuals with vouchers.

And we also have videos now on our website for the HCV program briefing videos.

We purchased those videos during COVID because we needed to put out a lot of vouchers on the street.

And we could not do that in the typical setting of 15 or 20 people in a small conference room.

And then, so I've been in local government 20 years.

I can acronym somebody all day.

But I think that maybe if we had a legend for all those acronyms that that might help somewhere in that document.

I can send you a link.

There's actually one on the HUB website that breaks down

90% of the acronyms they use.

So I will make sure I get you that.

I will provide you with the briefing documents that gives a written presentation to the participants of the key things they need to know.

We even go as far as creating a cheat sheet for them so that they can figure out how we break down what their income is.

We usually provide them with what the 30% and 40% of income is and how we calculate everything else.

So we do our best to make it as easy

for our crazy complicated world for them as we can.

And I can promise you, we answer lots of questions throughout every single day.

Like we don't leave them hanging, trying to figure out what's next, especially if we know there's participants that work with like region 10 or PACE or something like that.

We make sure that their case managers are involved from step one to step zero.

I think during the reasonable accommodation slide it talked primarily about if there are participants who need further assistance with things like that and I think one point on the the policy says that if they need a representative to manage things like

providing income changes or attending the annual recertifications or things like that.

That's a reasonable accommodation we can grant them so that their person that they're used to that works with them on a daily basis can handle making sure that they understand what's what.

We have a great relationship with most of the community partners that work with our clientele.

I think we spend just as much time talking with the support staff

I say that I have a short story that it's always in my head as I think about things like this when there's so much regulation.

And again, I've dealt with regulation for 20 years, I dealt with a family once.

It wasn't directly related to me, but

This kid who was six years old is going to school and trying to get in the MACA program.

And somebody came into this household, to this mother who had a second grade education, could not read, and plopped down a book this thick in order to get their kids some further education.

And I thought, how in the heck that's gonna happen because the mom can't read all the documents.

to even get the kid to be furthered along in their education.

You're right.

Almost 500 pages.

And then we had a lot of legalese in there and you even had to say May and Shall or May and Must.

And so I always

You're welcome and I will say that like the HDB staff they've been in place for several years and they're very apt to their clientele and they're very good about if they can see that puzzle look they'll take that next step to say you know I kind of see you're not understanding what can I explain further and you know the

Grand scheme of things is we attempt the best of our ability not to send somebody out the door who don't understand what it is that's happening.

Mr.

Sales can attest there's one particular participant that I've been working with for the past two months, I believe.

And like the same conversation happened every day.

Like almost to the point that we just copied the email and sent it again because there was that disconnect there and they couldn't quite understand it.

We do go above and beyond to do our best to educate them on what their responsibilities are.

But the whole legal back end of it, there's so much of it that pertains particularly to the housing authority and not so much the participants.

It's like our responsibility to carry out, not the participants responsibility to carry out.

And that's what a lot of that policy speaks to.

Like the participant part of it is there, but it's like just a fraction of everything that's actually the housing authority's responsibility.

Little fun fact, HUD is the most heavily regulated, federally regulated program there is.

Yep, probably heard us talk about it.

So yeah, I am available to anybody who has like one-on-one questions and wants to understand certain parts of the policy further.

I do not mind whatsoever breaking it down, even help building it, reading back through it to put this together.

There were aspects that's like, huh, okay, that's pretty cool to know.

So, I mean, it doesn't hurt whatsoever to have questions thrown my way.

And then as this gets approved and the CRHA staff

will be going through it again too.

So, I mean, not opposed whatsoever to continue answering any questions or helping a further understanding of any parts of it.

Awesome, thank you.

What was I gonna ask?

Oh, today I think there was a meeting that I couldn't attend, but it was from the Thomas Jefferson Planning District, I believe.

Was anyone able to join?

It sounded like a good tool for us.

I don't know if any of us attended but we have been in constant communication with them about the development of the tool and so we are both looking at it as a way of putting our own properties on that list while also utilizing that list for the HCV program and I spoke with Todd and even before TJPDC started their

Their tool, when I was with the city, we were looking at the housing navigator services and what that looked like.

And so we talked yesterday, Todd and I, Todd Niemeyer with the Human Rights Commission about adding additional units to that list because we've located some landlords that aren't traditional HCV landlords.

I don't know if they're traditional affordable housing landlords, but they weren't traditional HCV landlords.

And so this year when the housing market

was in flux because of COVID and we were able to put out these vouchers.

So we found landlords that weren't traditional HCV landlords.

And I think that new law that Virginia passed back in July as well is helping with what Mr.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that is helpful.

Other questions?

And it sounds like if I have a, I guess this is just a question with the resolution.

If you're still

Looking at it internally and working out details, things like Miss Green's question about zoning or particular aspects, like particular laws for each county or city now that we're in this MOU.

It does seem like maybe there's some, maybe that's part of the MOU who checks in on some of this.

Will we be able to make amendments?

So I think I missed a key part back in the beginning.

HUD releases what's called PIH notices pretty much on the daily.

And in those notices, they provide new guidance for different programs.

If one would come up for the HCV program, if it's a must, we're gonna adopt it, inform everybody that it's been adopted.

But if it's a may and we have to create a policy on it, that will come to the board each time something like that happens to adopt it into our policy and release it out to the public.

And I'm anticipating an amendment relatively soon.

So we are currently in the

and they're running for some mainstream vouchers.

So the preferences will change on that.

So we'll have to amend it once that award is finalized.

So there will probably be a change in a couple of months.

The goal really is to try to get it approved now so we can open up our wait list for the ACV program.

At the moment, we have a wait list of zero and we anticipate some vouchers becoming open due to some expiring that are on the street now.

Okay, that's helpful.

That's really helpful.

So if there are further, I mean, some of these questions are kind of long-term, like the zoning thing would take a long time to figure out how, you know, if we even have the staff ability to check on time to check on some of that, but that is helpful.

Okay.

The zoning thing, we could put it in the application.

If you, you know, if you want to be true, you can just say, are you meeting local zoning regulations?

Good point.

Okay.

So do you all, commissioners, do you feel like you're ready to vote on this as it stands?

Should I read, I'll read the resolution.

Okay, so CRHA Resolution Number 1417, Resolution Authorizing the Approval of the Amended Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Housing Choice Voucher Administration Plan.

Whereas the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority, CRHA, or the authority, administers a housing choice voucher program, this HCV program, in conjunction with its mission of providing quality and affordable housing.

Whereas the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, requires the authority to have an administrative plan to establish policies for implementation and oversight

HCV program in a manner consistent with HUD requirements and local goals and objectives, the HCV administrative plan.

Whereas HUD requires the authority to review HCV administrative plan on a regular basis and revise it as needed to ensure that it remains compliant with changes in HUD regulations and agency operations.

Whereas any revision to CRHA's HCV administrative plan must be approved by the board of commissioners of CRHA, the board before submission to HUD.

Whereas the authority's current HCV administrative plan last revised in September, 2018 has recently been updated to reflect changes in HUD regulations and CRHA operations.

and whereas the board desires to approve the revised HCV administrative plan dated as of October 1st, 2020 and to authorize submission of a copy of the updated HCV administrative plan to HUD.

Now therefore be it resolved by the board of commissioners of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority as follows.

One, the authority revised housing choice voucher administrative plan dated as of October 1, 2020 is hereby approved.

Two, the executive director or his designee is hereby authorized to take any and all actions

and to execute and deliver any and all agreements, instruments and other documents as may be necessary or desirable to facilitate implementation of the revised HCV administrative plan and to submit a copy of the revised HCV administrative plan to HUD.

All actions previously taken by the authority in connection with the transactions contemplated by this resolution are hereby ratified and approved.

This resolution shall be in effect from and after the date of its adoption.

Okay, and then it says adopted today, 12th of November, 2020.

Questions, are we ready to move ahead with this?

Okay, so I think we need a motion to approve this resolution.

So moved.

Second.

Okay, Mr.

Yes.

Carol Rucker, Commissioner Walker, Commissioner Slaughter.

Okay, now do people need a five minute break before launching into the brief update of the annual plan?

I will say I think Kathleen is shooting at 10 minutes.

I think flying through sounds good.

Hello, everyone.

I'm gonna try to keep it brief.

Just to remind everyone, we're also gonna have a meeting next week on the 18th.

So there'll be other opportunities as well.

Was everyone able to access the plan on the website?

Great.

So every year we do an annual plan.

Some years it gets done a little earlier than others.

but it's a comprehensive guide to all of our policies and operations.

A big part of what I'm gonna focus on tonight are just changes and goals that have been adapted just to get that on everyone's radar so that we can drill into that more.

The plan is due to HUD 75 days prior to our fiscal year beginning, which is April 1.

We have to submit the HUD by the second week of January.

So that's part of the timeline that we're on now.

I met with our resident advisory board, our council on September 23rd.

And we had a discussion on some of the housing needs resources, some of the policies, one of which I was glad to see it was just approved and other items that we wanted to focus on.

As you saw attached, the plan was kind of, each this year attached, we had the new procurement policy as well as this revised administrative plan draft and I'll note in the final plan that it's been approved.

We also, I've attached demographic information from our resident characteristic reports, which come from PICC on the HUD website.

It's the information we submit to HUD.

And I'll be updating that also with some probably November data before I submit the final report.

We also, you know, because of the pandemic, we've had tradition to virtual public meetings.

Usually these meetings are held in community centers at different sites.

I think the majority of you have been at those meetings.

They're usually at night and

We, you know, I sort of miss being able to have them this year, but we're working really hard to have the meetings available on the 18th.

They're gonna be two times during the day.

There's gonna be an option of both a dial-in or a Zoom meeting.

We are also, you know, this meeting is virtual.

Our public hearing is gonna be virtual.

So it's just a very different feel this year.

Part of what I do is I take all the comments that we receive when we meet with the Resident Advisory Board, anything I might hear from you tonight or throughout the planning period.

And also particularly all the comments I hear on the 18th.

And I will put that together and attach that to the plan.

And when recommended, we'll make adjustments possibly to items on the plan and note that.

in the attachments so that people know where adjustments were made due to feedback we got from the board or from residents that we took into consideration.

If you look at our website, you can also see last year's plan and our five year plan.

There's a lot of goals from our previous plan and our five-year plan that are still in progress.

So when I spoke with our resident advisory board, it was recommended that we carry this over and we look at it.

I think it was Brandon who had the great suggestion that we look at it more of a strategic plan in the reporting.

So I changed the formatting a little bit.

I hope it was a little easier to read this year.

It's still a work in progress.

But some of the, this is the most important page in my presentation tonight.

These are the items that we really want to drill down on.

First, at the top of the list is safety on our public housing sites.

You know, we're talking about possible camera policies and ways to improve security.

Linda also talked too about homeownership programs.

We're starting that off with our new admin plan and we'll be looking at other opportunities as well with some of the development work we do.

We're rebuilding our family self-sufficiency program.

We are looking at all types of opportunities for funding for that and I'm wide open to ideas as well and I welcome conversation on that.

The CCTC is something we've also been looking at.

We wanna really grow that out at some point, let that arm flex itself, possibly move some staff there.

We've been having a lot of conversations about all of our redevelopment staff eventually being housed there.

It's something that we just wanna have more conversations on.

Also,

We've been having increasing conversations about setting up an actual nonprofit arm and this would be a way to access more funding to really build out resident service opportunities and it's something that we're hoping the Resident Service Committee can talk about as well.

We've been really fortunate this year with some of the funds we've been able to access.

When I'm finished, I'll let Mr.

Sales talk a little bit about a little success we had this evening.

Let's see.

Another topic, which I don't know if we'll be tackling this year or not, but we really want to get it on everyone's radar, is researching our ability to issue bonds.

That's come up and we want to look into that.

We want to find out more.

Focusing more on the long-term agency sustainability plan.

I know that's in the works, it's happening, and we just wanna really keep that on everyone's radar.

Mainstream vouchers, I think that's gonna be something that we talk about a lot in coming months.

And I think it might move us to maybe have a presentation from that, maybe one of our future work sessions.

and increasing the agency's ability to do internal project management for construction so that eventually we will be able to manage projects and have the capacity in-house to handle that.

And finally, as we ended with Melinda's presentation too, project-based vouchers and LIHTC policies and programs.

For the low income tax credit, there's a lot of rules and regulations, and there's gonna be a lot of policies that are being adapted for that.

So that should be part of almost every board meeting for the rest of the year, something with either PVV or LIHTC policies.

So I just wanted to have that on everyone's radar.

We have sent the draft to the city to review in order for us to get them to sign off on it.

They have to consult with neighborhood services and look at the consolidated plan and make sure that we're consistent with that.

I know Mr. Norris has had many conversations

about that, and we're gonna continue to be doing that.

But eventually what we're looking at is for them to sign a certification form that will be attached to the final plan when we submit it to HUD.

And it will be in the packet for the board's approval in December.

The next steps, as I said before, we're having a community meeting on the 18th.

It's gonna be at four and 6 p.m. We've published that in the paper.

We're gonna be talking to PHAR.

I put together a flyer and I think PHAR's gonna probably make some adjustments to it and we're gonna figure out the best ways to get it out next week.

We're trying to decide if we're gonna do it on Monday or Tuesday, which days can be better and we're gonna try to get that everywhere.

I'm probably going to have it on Facebook as well.

Just try to get the word out.

We're going to take all those notes, as I said before, and compile those.

I'm also hoping during those meetings to hear a lot of feedback about our capital funds program so that we can use that information in the coming months when we're working on updating that as well.

On the 17th, we're gonna have our hearing for the annual plan.

And that'll also be held virtually to be followed by the board meeting where we're hoping to have a resolution on that.

And then the entire packet is sent to HUD for review and approval, as I said before, by mid January.

And then we start all over again and we wanna start a lot earlier next year.

We did a pretty good job at getting it on the agenda this year with everything happening but we really wanna start early next year.

So you're gonna be hearing about this at the beginning of the summer.

And we're gonna be probably wanting to just revamp a lot of things and make it a much more user-friendly document.

And that is all I have for you all.

Questions?

That was really great.

Thank you, Kathleen.

I just was hoping, and I don't want to extend this conversation longer than it needs to go right now, but I was wondering if you could just say a little bit more about developing the nonprofit arm if you guys have ideas.

I think you've been working on a lot longer than I have, but stuff gotten here.

Kathleen has really focused a lot on the grant funding opportunities and we've like every week it seems like she's looking at a new opportunity for grant funding and a lot of the grants require a non-profit.

We are quasi-government agencies so we fall right in the middle.

Most of the city programs and grants they'll allow us a platform but some of the bigger ones like the Lowe's and Home Depot programs

They require you to be a nonprofit.

And part of that is, you know, we would need to have agreement from the board and would also need to speak to the city about it.

And that's why we want to make that an additional goal with our annual plan this year.

I think it's an awesome idea, especially, I mean, I think

Thank you for having me.

But I think in the past there just hasn't even been the bandwidth to go for many grants because the staff was pretty thin.

But with this new structure in place where that you can devote more time to this, I think it would be awesome.

And I mean, there's no end of programs that could flow from that or ways to find grant funding to push money into

Hey what's the good news Mr.

Sales?

I was kind of late getting to the board meeting because I was at the CDBG task force and we really

made a big ask for a three-year grant, but we didn't get that, but we got a one-year grant to start an eviction prevention program to actually hire a staff person to go out and do prevention work with a little bit of funding for them to also have some assistance available for people who participate in the program.

I'm very excited about that.

We need it desperately right now.

Oh, great.

Yeah.

Good work.

It's really nice to see.

I mean, you know, I think everything it's a, as was alluded to the regulatory, I mean, just all of the little details take so much attention.

It's hard to ever move forward and get into the kind of new programs though.

Well, I'm going to have Davinia send out a copy of the information I just went over, particularly so you can see the list of goals we want to really focus on.

And if anyone has questions, feel free to get back to me.

I also just wanted to give a quick

Shout out for the Resident Services Committee.

Betsy, Joy, and Dr. Henry can come up with some dates soon and we'll get that launched.

We're considering a couple of things with that.

I've applied for a grant for $10,000 from the Vibrant Community Fund that we could use for that committee to get things started.

and also we're looking at having kind of a neighborhood crisis management group get built out from that committee and we're having that you know share more information about that once the committee is able to get started on it.

Can I ask one question on the annual plan and it doesn't need to be discussed right now and Mr Osteen just texted me that he lost his internet so he

hang up on us purposely.

The question about the project and construction management, and I don't have a succinct enough question now, but I'm just thinking that that makes a lot of sense on modernization and some projects, and maybe just someone that, you know, we're not always going to have an entire community being redeveloped, so,

I'm just wondering more about the intentions of that.

I can give you a very short answer.

So we would like to get to the point where we're looking at preventative maintenance when it comes to our properties.

So we're looking at getting P&As for all of our sites.

And the project manager will be the lead person for the CFP program.

and also conduct the community engagement and working hand in hand to ensure that what's identified in the P&A we're on top of.

So we're not running into broke down elevators, boiler systems, HVAC systems, hot water tank issues, roofing issues.

So we really stay on top of those because we are still a little ways away from developing some of our smaller sites where they're getting to the point of useful life on some of the items like mechanical items are,

going to certainly start ticking up.

And as we start pulling units off of line, offline of public housing, our CFP dollars will drop.

Got it.

I just, I can look it up.

That's okay.

So that's something that should get done every five years.

Yep.

We're also thinking long-term and aspiring to actually bring in more funds for the agency by doing different projects.

It might be that we purchase property and develop it ourselves.

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

I guess when I saw that I was thinking

And in the grand scheme of things, that individual will be doing that type of work.

So the partnership we have right now with our redevelopment partners, they're providing a lot of capacity where we are lacking.

So, but that isn't built to

It's not sustainable on their end.

They aren't gonna do that for the next 15 years while we're redeveloping.

The MLU was designed for us to solely gain that capacity and knowledge to where we fully take over.

And they're more of just a funding and providing advice instead of walking us through the entire process.

So like we have a huge development team right now with a lot of expertise.

And Brauno is gonna be one of those individuals that are gonna be helping us.

He just popped on the camera.

So I'll just make sure I call him out a little bit.

That's awesome.

And maybe Brauno, I don't know, you know.

Cool.

About the nonprofit,

Mr.

Sales, you said that other housing authorities had done this?

Well, before I came here,

I worked in, before I came to Charlottesville, I worked in Chesapeake and Delphine Carnes, our attorney, is also the attorney for Chesapeake.

So she was setting their nonprofit up when I was, actually she had just set it up when I was leaving.

So we'll work with her to do that for us as well, help us with the bylaws.

So we're protecting the agency because it is a potential liability for the agency since it is, the agency in general is responsible for that nonprofit.

So we'll make sure we're working with her throughout the entire process.

No, the nonprofit.

So the redevelopment arm is actually a corporation.

It's not a nonprofit.

So the nonprofit, it's going to be a separate nonprofit that we're using to do some of the residential services.

Our resident services work because a lot of times you can't use federal funds for that.

So we're hoping that building a nonprofit will allow us to get funds outside from private sources that want to tax deductible donations.

Right now you provide donations to us.

It doesn't benefit you.

But with the nonprofit, we can actually give that benefit.

And at some point, we would like to have our board also working to help us with the donations and assisting us with that.

Because we are doing a lot of good work.

We're getting a lot of good press.

I think the community is starting to see it.

The residents are seeing it.

So I think more agencies and organizations will be willing to provide funding for us, but we need to make it really easy for them.

And other agencies have this nonprofit status, so they're directly benefiting from it by donating money.

That makes a lot of sense.

Other questions?

And then we've got one more round or opportunity for public comment before we close.

Okay, let's go to public comment.

And I don't know, Mr.

Yes, I can do that right now.

All right.

The last time I commented after I was done, it booted me off the thing and I had to use a different email to get on.

So I'm hoping that doesn't happen after this comment.

But since you're mostly done, I guess that would be okay.

I think this is a really great meeting.

I want to say first congratulations on CDBG.

That has been a long desire from some with far particular one nodding their head really good.

to really start going after that money for housing authority.

And I just, I think we all appreciate the work that's been put into grant writing.

And I think it's having a really positive effect on housing authority.

I was really excited about that presentation on the admin plan.

It was a lot of information.

was glad to have the refresher.

I just wanna say to Commissioner Green, if that seems like a lot, wait till you see the ACOP, which is the public housing, similar document.

And it is really hard and it is really hard for residents.

And that's one thing that PHAR can really help with.

We are able to help residents with issues with HCV.

We don't get a ton of requests for help for that.

And I think one thing that stuck out to me in the admin plan, the consistent thing that we get is when people are denied eligibility and

Sometimes it's out of sheer luck that they realize they can come talk to us and learn about the informal review process.

So I just really encourage housing authority to promote PHAR and legal aid when there are those kinds of situations to just make sure that those notices include, you know, if you disagree with this, you know, please contact PHAR or legal aid and consider an informal review.

Also, we, I'm sorry, got a little sidetracked.

I was really excited to hear about the different options for the seasonal workers, the folks who work for Aramark being able to choose which path works best for them on how they would handle their rent decrease.

and I just would like to sort of double check and throw that out there on the public housing side as well.

I'm not really sure where it stands with public housing right now in the ACOP.

If that's not an option currently, I really hope you all can move towards that option quickly.

That could be a huge help.

I know we went through some wrangling on that a while back.

We are very much looking forward to seeing that waiting list open and just really happy that the admin plans together.

And as you're putting together those hard copies, I would love one for the PHAR office so that we can better assist people.

I think if you're looking for resources to get the quick and dirty on HUD housing programs, if you go to the National Law Income Housing Coalition,

publishes a book every year and they have an updated one for 2020.

I'm gonna put it in the chat.

You can read it online and you can, you know, at your leisure, just look up things that you wanna learn about.

I mean, it tells you about everything, PBVs, BBRA, anything.

So if you're a commissioner and wanna learn more or just curious about how other things work, it's a really great resource.

and I am enthusiastic about the annual plan and just really grateful for the collaboration and what is new in the process this year is that PHAR as the Resident Advisory Board was able to meet with CRHA staff and talk about goals in a pretty free setting and just really pleased to see that that's all made it into the draft plan and I think that's super awesome and

really encourage us all to continue this great collaboration on all aspects.

Brandon, can I just follow up on one thing?

I was thinking as you were talking about how difficult it is for residents to understand these regulations, Section 8 and public housing residents.

And I wonder if this is something that might be a task to try to get some money from the Equity Center at UVA to develop a more user-friendly method to provide this a video, something like they have a lot of expertise there.

And then the other thing that I'd just like to say for the record as a UVA employee is that it's shameful that there are people who work at UVA and need to worry about seasonal rent problems because of the way that their work is structured.

So UVA needs to do better.

It needs to pay its contractors a living wage all year round.

Very well said.

I do think there is a role to play in being able to educate residents with more user-friendly materials.

This is something that PHAR tries to do on a given subject.

I think training is also really important.

That's why, like tonight's presentation, while it was very dry, this is the kind of stuff that PHAR can really take in and can work with residents on

on explaining these things.

We're just now having a conversation about public housing admissions and orientation and how we can sort of reintegrate far into that work.

And I think, you know,

Once we can kind of get that fleshed out and in process, we should be looking to do that for section eight as well for the HCV program.

I think that would be really great.

And I will say Brandon to address the seasonal rent for the public housing.

We will eventually be tackling the ACUP, but we wanted to do one plan at a time, because there is a massive lift.

It took us weeks going back and forth, and HUD had to approve the plan.

So it was even longer because they were literally going through every word, wanting us to justify everything that we decided we wanted to do.

So it was not easy, and the ACUP is going to be just as hard.

but we are going to eventually do that and we look forward to partnering with Foreign Legal Aid to get that done.

Yeah.

Oh, and if you all are okay, I could speak with Miss Goldblatt about the Equity Center.

And since I work at the School of Architecture, there's a lot of graphic design-y people and students who I always think would be great at translating some of the words into visuals.

So maybe we can find...

That's great.

As a member of the English department, we're specialists at taking things that are easy and making them as complicated as possible.

But you can write a sentence.

Okay.

So one thing about that is sometimes it's not I mean I'm when I was having that conversation it's it's not even necessarily about you know there are folks that maybe can't read as well but this is a lot of legal jargon yeah there's a lot of and obviously uh acronyms and things and and so I like the picture idea I like the equity idea of Miss Goldblatt also um

Are we translating this to other languages?

Is there somewhere we have this translated?

It's funny.

Am I still on?

Yes.

We're actually, so we have a really cool partnership that we're still kind of trying, dying to use.

Through a community foundation grant, we also got hooked up with a year's connection with Catch a Fire, which is basically, it's almost like Uber for volunteers or something.

So we're actually getting ready to put out a request for translators for the various languages to help PHAR develop some materials to be able to better reach people.

I don't know if Housing Authority actually has that.

I don't remember if y'all got that grant or not, but we ought to be able to collaborate if you didn't.

Do you, I wonder if we can, I'm sorry, Lisa, can we broaden the term translation to use it for translating to English too?

Yes, because we, I've got a kid and I don't remember which school this was, but one of the schools just sent out something recently.

And I saw in the admin plan, you know, it was talking about accommodations, there was translation, you know, different points about that.

Right.

I will say that is one of our weaknesses.

We do not have good translation services both when it comes to peer conversations like re-examinations, briefings.

We've identified that as a weakness so we're looking into what services are available.

But the admin plan, I think that's something that no one ever really thinks about.

What about individuals who don't speak English?

And we actually have a number of them.

I think we had one that turned down the voucher because they could not understand.

So that is a concern.

And so we will look into that.

And Spanish, I will say Spanish is not our number two language in our public housing.

It is not Spanish and it's not French either.

So

It might not even be in your top eight, Lisa.

So we have a large diverse language population.

That's the word.

to worry about that too.

As I say, every time I look at this stuff when I see that kid and that mom's face trying to just get her kid a better education.

And that wasn't about translation.

That was just about, I can't read all these documents.

Yeah.

Okay.

Are there other public comments?

All right.

I am just energized by everyone's just work on this.

It's amazing.

Thank you all, and I kind of don't want to adjourn because it's fun to talk to you all, but we're going on three hours.

And I move to adjourn.

I second.

and I guess we have to do the roll call because it's virtual.

Mr.

Yes.

Commissioner Osteen?

Commissioner Mayor Walker?

Commissioner Slaughter?

Thank you.

All right.

Good night.

Good night.

Still on, their commissioner stakeholders attaches a copy of the annual plan presentation.

Attach is a copy of the annual plan presentation from the board work session.

CRHA boards work session.

Document to share from Miss Kathleen Glenn-Matthews from the board work.

Document to share from Miss Glenn-Matthews.