CRHA Meeting   11/22/2021

Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and start now.

Okay.

Virginia code 2-237082.

provides that a public body may meet virtually if the locality in which it is located has declared a local state of emergency provided that the catastrophic nature of the declared emergency makes it impracticable

or unsafe to assemble a quorum in a single location, and two, the purpose of the meeting is to provide for the continuity of operations of the public body or the discharge of its lawful purposes, duties, or responsibilities.

Mayor Walker?

Present.

Commissioner Goldblatt?

Commissioner Green?

Present.

Commissioner Wicks?

She was here.

Commissioner Parker?

Okay, I'm going to read the announcements, meeting dates, and reminders.

First of all, CRHA work board session will be Thursday, December 9th at 5.

Board regular meeting will be Monday, December 20th at six.

The safety meeting, which is every other Tuesday.

The next one coming up will be December 7th and December 21st.

And those are at 6 PM.

and there's a pass code that you need to get into it.

I'll read it off.

It's 181698.

And I think you can find the link if you go to the webpage.

The Redevelopment Committee meets every other Thursday of the month at 4 p.m. And so the updated times are December 2nd

and December 16th.

The Resident Services Committee meets every second Tuesday of the month at 1 p.m.

The Maintenance Committee meets every second Tuesday of the month at 4 p.m.

The Personnel Committee meets quarterly or present eternally.

and the finance committee is to be arranged.

Okay.

Public comments?

I guess I should ask first any other announcements that I didn't mention that anybody else has to make.

At this time, if you'd like to address the commission, please click your raise hand icon.

You have three minutes to speak.

Well, you always get to comment.

I was just gonna say your name.

Comments from Shelby?

Good evening, CRHA Board of Commissioners.

My name is Shelby Marie Edwards.

I use she, her, and hers.

I'm the Executive Director of PHAR, the Public Housing Association of Residents.

We are the duly recognized federally mandated housing association.

So September, October, and November has been very preoccupied with hiring and onboarding of new PHAR staff.

Our staff

includes Paola Covarrubias, Kelsey Jones, Salithia Carr, Alexis Cooper, Cecilia Barber, Erica Gaines, and Ingrid Fagans, who is our volunteer.

We are so excited to continue being out and about in the community in a way that is COVID safe and friendly.

PHAR has received multiple complaints lately about maintenance updates.

I was pleased to hear and

Dr. Henry's update, something about a maintenance committee reconvening.

If that could either be reiterated one more time before the end of the meeting, I think that would be great.

But I love hearing that the maintenance committee would potentially reconvene.

I also know that Rent Cafe is slated to start in the site sometime early next year, Rent Cafe being the online model for residents being able to pay rent.

So I would love

I would love to see CRHA do some type of training with the residents so that they are comfortable with that in the new year.

And those are my updates.

Thank you so much, everybody.

And I look forward to seeing the rest of the meeting and seeing how things play out.

Thanks, y'all.

Update from commissioners.

Is there a safety committee update?

I missed this last meeting.

I had two meetings that day, so I didn't get to go to the past meeting.

But the last meetings that we were talking about before this one, we was basically talking about the exterminations to the,

Units where I had spoke up about when the units get treated that they need to treat all the units in the row instead of the one unit because if you treat just that one unit

whatever bugs depends on whatever it is that they are exterminating is going to run back and forth to either neighbors and a couple of residents had spoke up you know about the COVID but I understand that we are in COVID but if we're prepared we prepare ourselves and they're prepared to come into our units we need to have that done and not just one unit treated at one time because

A lot of units have been being done and a couple of units have been being left out.

And some of those units that have been left out are a lot of the ones that are the most infested.

And we had the outdoor meeting, which kind of got a little chilly, but it seemed to been going great.

We was talking about the different structures of the,

Apartments and you know what we felt that was needed to be done to them and one resident had spoke up and Mr. Oh, excuse me.

Oh, I can't think of Mrs.

Sales.

was supposed to go see her.

So I don't wanna say her name because I don't know if we have that permission to do so.

But Mr.

Sales was supposed to spoke with her the next day but I'm not sure if he spoke with her on her apartment or not.

And then just basically we was gonna reiterate how to do the safety meetings.

Are we gonna do them?

Any other commissioners have an update?

Okay, I'm gonna move then onto the finance director update and the financial report.

Oops, sorry.

Hello, I know this finance,

Report I sent out today, I'm sorry, it was a little last minute, but it wasn't without a lot of effort.

So the write-up, if you've had a chance to look at it, as we've kind of reiterated every month, that overall bottom line, the first five pages, I don't know, Kathleen, if you have that and want to share it, it's not totally necessary, but it might help as a point of reference for anyone who doesn't have it in front of them.

Against budget, we're doing really well, but again, we're $517,000 ahead of budget at this point, but that includes $644,000 worth of, for all intent and purposes, non-recurring money, $515,000 in shortfall funds, and of the total PPP grant of 270,

There's approximately 129 included in our financials here.

There was another portion of it that went to last fiscal year across public housing to help our scores.

And there's the remainder of it in redevelopment and the city funds, which eventually we will get to on the financial, the finance committee.

They're not included with the HUD statements though.

So, well, it looks great.

It's not as great as it appears.

Oh, I was talking about the actual statements.

Was that also attached with that?

The good news is that I don't want to steal John's thunder.

He probably may have shared it in other forums, but the PPP loan was fully forgiven.

We applied and they turned it around fairly quickly.

So

Just to point to the items that I spoke of, in the middle section under grant income, the second line HUD shortfall funds, that's currently at 515,000.

The PTD is actually our fiscal year to date actual.

And then Kathleen, if you wanna scroll down one page.

And because of the way our scoring works,

We're pulling expenses out rather than adding the PPP revenue in.

So under administrative salaries, you can see the second line where there's a negative of 125.

And then the fourth line where there's a negative under some insurance items for 4,000, that's the 129 that has been pulled out.

And actually it contributes to the other funds that I talked about in zeros out.

the total amount of the PPP loan.

Let's see.

So we did in October, we did draw $184,000 of shortfall.

I'll just as a preview in November, we withdrew the balance of what is available to us at this time.

And John can probably speak to that a little bit better than I can.

as to when and what is available.

I will say we are on track with, we've had since I started, there's been, it's been a struggle on any credit accounts.

Like we have a credit account at Lowe's.

There's probably anywhere from, I would say on a low end, maybe 35 to 60 or 70 transactions a month.

So to get all of those receipts timely and to get them entered, when I started, we had a lot of catching up to do.

And this is the first month that it actually, I didn't have to do an entry, actually I may have done an entry for it, but we had all the receipts, but for one, so we just couldn't post it.

And likewise with the credit cards and just some things that were lagging, everything is caught up.

The only exception right now is the VRS retirement,

just need to spend a little time on and that will get entered in all up to date for November.

But the total there that falls to the bottom line on our expense side, I think I've accrued a portion of it.

So it may only be an additional like $8,000.

Let's see what else.

We looked at every, you have the statements by AMP, but we looked at every individual

Cost Center property, and they all are performing fairly well against the budget.

Again, some better than others if you were to take out the shortfall funds.

One thing to point out, just so you're aware of it with Crescent Halls, what's happened is in the past, they were getting their proportional share

based on the number of total units that we have.

So when we had 376, they were at 105.

I can't remember the percentage off the top of my head, somewhere between 25 and 30%.

Now that the number of approved units has gone down, they are getting significantly less, but those costs have to go someplace.

So we've reduced the denominator from 376 to

I think 326.

I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but now every other cost center is gonna get a slightly higher proportionate share.

Oh, 324.

Thanks, John.

Because the denominator has been decreased.

So if you had 100 before out of 300, you got a third.

And if you reduce those number of units to 200, now you're getting half.

So obviously it's not that dramatic.

It's less significant on the scattered sites because there's such a small percentage to begin with, but it basically is shifting some of the costs that we had budgeted for Crescent Halls to the other property.

So, and between now and the end of the year, we will see an effect from that.

On the HCV side, I continue to kind of shift through, or sift through all of the different types of vouchers that we're getting money for now.

Some have been leased up faster than others.

So I don't necessarily have a handle on what might be due back.

We're getting closer to knowing that number, but they've all been allocated out to their proper cost center.

So we, the HCV report that you see, it is a roll up of

the mainstream vouchers, the tenant protection vouchers, the emergency housing vouchers.

There's probably a few more in there that have activity.

So we are looking at it and eventually I'll be able to pay a little bit more attention to the revenue that we've gotten versus the revenue that we've earned.

Let's see, what else?

On the central office, the management fee is down.

That also plays into the number of units.

Typically you get X amount per bed.

We're not getting as much anymore.

I mentioned the small business PPP loan has been forgiven.

The net loss for the month.

Can you go to COC, Kathleen?

I think it's like the third, maybe the fourth one.

It's after,

HCB, yeah, a few more pages.

So one thing, when I sent these to John to preliminary review immediately, he's like, the COC has a loss.

And that's true.

If you go to the last, oh, you went too far, I think.

One more page.

Right here.

If you can get the bottom line on the screen.

So here, the month to date actuals shows $12,300 loss for the month.

And that typically does not happen.

I can tell you that's 100% attributed to

Towards the bottom of the admin expenses on this page, there's a $17,567 expense.

That was a IRS tax penalty that I was previously totally unaware of.

It was assessed against CRHA for failing to timely file 1099s for the tax year of 2017.

By the end of 2018, they probably would have been notified.

They must have submitted them within 30 days because I believe the minimum penalty was assessed, which is $50 per 1099.

So it's around 340, 350 1099s.

It's not only for our vendors, but most of the landlords have to get a rent 1099.

So

I found out about it by accident.

Our health insurance company had conflicting information related to our tax ID number.

And I called the IRS to verify it.

And they were actually very helpful.

I spoke to a live person.

And when we got all done, he goes, you owe us $17,000 and there's a lien coming out in the next week.

It just happened to be that timing.

So for a short period of time, we did have a little bit of panic.

that there was a lien.

Basically, if we hadn't paid it by the timeline they had requested, the bank would have taken it out of our account and paid it for us and taken a fee also.

So to my knowledge, Michelle gave me a file at some point at the end of 2018 or early 2019, there was a letter written and a request for it to be waived.

Their response was no.

But they had several different mailing addresses for us.

So we never got the, I don't know.

I don't know what happened, but I didn't see at the time, I'm assuming if they had seen it, they would have been aware of it, either accrued for it and or paid for it.

Certainly auditors should have accrued for it in the 2017, 2018 fiscal year.

So I will,

Bring this up at our audit, which is coming up to see how they want to handle it.

But that was a little bit of a hit that we took this month.

You confirmed that there were no other outstanding.

Yeah, so it was the only one and we also, the guy who was kind of like our case manager on it was actually very helpful.

And I talked to him about what other avenues that we could take given that it was $17,000, what were the chances that we would be able to get that waived?

And we had missed all the timing deadlines to appeal the initial decision.

So he basically said it was slim to none, but if we wanted to hire an attorney to fight it, we could.

And we didn't think that that was going to be a value based on the information that we had and the letters that we had received once we finally got it.

Mayor, I will comment that shortly after we discovered that, we went to pick up our utility bills from the city.

and because one of the addresses that they had was our office in the city, they actually had sent something to City Hall with a return receipt requested, like there had to be an acknowledgement.

So somebody at City Hall actually signed for it and that was sent like at the end of July or August and we got it at the beginning of October.

So I guess mail is hard to come by if it doesn't find the right place in city hall.

So, but we had known about it by that and we're in the process of resolving it.

And then the only other thing that I wanted to point out on COC is, Kathleen, if you can scroll up one page.

Oh, right there, administrative.

and the administrative, oh, sorry, I actually don't think it's on this page.

I'm sorry, it's on the next page.

Down under general expenses, it's actually the last line on here.

I've added and tried to capture from June going forward and I'm gonna go back and reconcile at least to the beginning of the fiscal year.

When I started, we pay pretty hefty insurance bills for,

I think it's three or four retirees.

One of the retirees is also insuring their spouse and they reimburse us for it.

And there's small co-pays on that and it adds up and it always kind of just got lumped in with our administrative employee expenses in the COC cost center.

And you can see now that this is only five months worth of expense and the year to date we're at $10,000.

It does run, I may have captured a little bit in the early months, but I think it's in the neighborhood of at least 15 to $18 a month minimum.

We did get notified that the city is changing one of their plans.

It's either life insurance or I think it's some kind of life insurance that will actually save us a little money.

And they thankfully did contact us and Michelle is working

with the insurance provider, and I believe the contact at the city to move over our retirees on that.

But I'm told there's not much we can do about that, but you know, for our total budget, where I think if you looked, I'm not sure that it's on here because the whole year to date budget, but I think we've only budgeted like a $10,000 surplus, you know, exclusive of any like extraneous money, like the PPP money, our budget was,

pretty close to break even.

And if we didn't budget this money for the retiree expense, it's gonna obviously affect our bottom line.

So I just wanted to point that out.

Well, he just made a case for having centralized office

So we all doesn't go to a different one.

I'm not moving around every other year or two, I guess, which is hard to, hard to accommodate, but we're doing, we've set up a designated invoices shared mailbox.

So we have made that available to any vendor that tries to email us or send us anything electronically.

So if there's turnover, it doesn't sit in my mailbox or Connie's mailbox or somebody who's no longer with us, it is there and then you just give different people access to it.

Any questions?

I've got one question.

It was in your like executive summary.

Oops, somehow I just got rid of it.

There you go.

Under number one, like see how you explain that we're slightly under budget with the year to date operating net income of 149 versus the budget of 275.

Is there like

Exactly.

Kathleen, if you could go to page five of the whole thing.

Yep, right there.

Yeah, so if you just take out that $644,000, that's what you're left with.

So we are

Well, we are currently in a surplus net income situation.

We're lagging behind the budget.

And is that mostly like that our rent revenue is not as anticipated?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean.

I might have to defer to someone else on that.

I mean, I know that there are efforts being made.

Just to be clear too, the revenue is as if everyone paid us 100%.

At the end of the year, we will look at like bad debt to say how likely it is to be collected.

And in the future, we may do some kind of factor to adjust that month to month.

But the revenue hasn't been adjusted down for collections.

So that's another thing to factor into that, that, you know, it's likely whatever adjustment will

go down, but I do know that there are efforts being made when we have seen just in the last couple of weeks, I want to say between three and $4,000 from the rent relief program, the state program, where a few applications had been done for our tenants with us as the landlord.

And we have had some success with that.

And I know that they're working to get additional applications in before the deadline on 1130.

But where we sit year to date, those other funds are, you know, that has kind of made us flush, but

You know, this is the conversation that I have with John constantly is that, you know, when we look to make changes over, you know, if it's salary increases or something's gonna affect the budget is gonna increase.

We have to know, well, how are we doing on the revenue and expense side, exclusive of the extraordinary revenues, are we keeping track?

And if we're not, and we think that things are gonna increase next year or change,

Maybe department by department because you know, the COC revenue may go down because of the way the units are going to be situated with the redevelopment.

So how, how do we make that up?

And I think that's, those are all discussions that need to be had when we start talking about the budget for next year.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Good evening, everyone.

I'll pick up where Mary Lou left off a little bit, just touching on the budget a little bit more.

Crescent halls through a curve ball, the changing of crescent halls and redevelopment plan drastically changed revenues for the housing authority.

The plan included keeping crescent halls at least partially filled.

with adding voucher units which provided an additional rental revenue for the housing authority because the vouchers would have been project based and the funding when it came to the landlord.

So we've issued the vouchers to then lease them up in our units, which the voucher returns a higher dollar amount monthly than traditional public housing units.

So that has drastically changed.

the funding for the housing authority.

It did not hurt the housing authority because we had other sources.

Last year we were awarded shortfall funding.

It was roughly $700,000.

We used part of that last year and then we finished the remainder this year.

Mary Lou just showed it was $515,000 this year.

So that helped a lot and it made it possible to change the redevelopment plan

Crescent Halls without us having to go find additional sources to cover the reduction in tenant revenue.

And then I'll touch on Shelby's Rent Cafe training request for residents.

We're currently working on getting the staff trained for Rent Cafe.

It's new, they're still rolling out the modules.

So staff is getting trained on it and then we will also have the training for the residents.

And then the maintenance concerns, we do have a meeting with PHAR to talk about maintenance issues.

If they receive calls from tenants, we discuss that during that time.

A lot of the times the maintenance concerns aren't already in work orders.

So we add the work order and then track it from there.

We provide updates to follow on those work orders.

And then for my,

Typical update, we're currently working through the corrective action plan, which is the caps that HUD created with the housing authority in the city to address the public housing deficiencies and the HCV deficiencies.

We also do have a financial improvement plan, which we signed at the end of last year, which allowed us to access the shortfall funding.

So we did get approved for FY2022 shortfall funding as well.

And that is an amount of approximately $500,000.

And so we can't touch that money yet until we have a approved plan by HUD, but we should not have an issue getting that plan approved.

The goal to access this second portion of the funds is to meet a month

of operating reserve, just having one month.

Based upon the budget that was sent over to HUD today, we had over five months of reserve in our bank account to cover operations for public housing for up to five months.

So that should not be an issue to access.

We did plan to use that for the next budget year.

So nine times out of 10, the funds won't be seen this year.

They would start being drawn down in April of next year.

We are preparing for a HUD REAC inspection.

It's anticipated to happen between January and March of 2022.

We are looking at hiring a firm to come and inspect all the public housing units to create work orders.

And we've discussed addressing those work orders in multiple different ways to include our staff addressing them and also hiring temp work to also address them.

Last year, we got down to the same issue, and it also happened around Crescent Halls, where we have 10 to 13 staff members in maintenance, and we have six of them working in the vacant units, turning them over to be leased up by, currently, it's some Crescent Halls families relocating, and then individuals that are on our wait list.

We stopped doing turns last year and the beginning of this year to focus on

The audit in Crescent Halls and our numbers took a deep dive.

We moved out a lot of families and we weren't turning any units because we spent about a month and a half working through Crescent Halls to get those units ready for families to transition from floor to floor when we were doing the original floor by floor redevelopment approach.

So we're trying not to do that again this year by bringing in another firm to assist us with working on the work orders.

Vacancy update, we currently have a total of 20 vacant units.

Five of those units are at South First Street.

So those units are gonna be under demo-dispo as of this week or early next week.

We did get the approval from HUD to move forward with submitting the demo-dispo application for redevelopment of South First Street phase two.

So that would only leave 15 of those units that need to be turned.

We have four of them ready or currently in the progress of getting completed based on cleaning the floors or cleaning the unit.

So buffing and waxing the floors or cleaning the unit.

Two of them are already planned to be leased up by Crescent Hall's tenants.

Based upon that, we're on track to meet our goal of having zero vacancies by April 1st.

We're currently at 93% occupancy.

That was as of Wednesday of last week.

Since then, we've leased up four units, so I have not ran the correct report to remove some of the units that are under demo-dispo.

When a unit sits vacant longer than two months, HUD allow, two weeks, HUD allows you to take that unit and take it offline if it requires significant work to get that unit back online.

And we've done that with multiple units.

So we still receive operating subsidy for those units.

We don't receive a rent subsidy.

So the units that are offline, they don't count against us on a vacancy, only the units that are online.

And one of the ones that have been vacant for the longest, I think it's 1,800 days right now, is slated to be completed Wednesday.

So that's the longest vacancy we do have.

Under the management cap, CRHA is working with the RAB and Legal Aid to rewrite the ACUP, which is the Emissions and Continued Occupancy Policy for Public Housing.

We anticipate having this policy completed into the board in January.

Also under management, an item that was flagged by HUD is the tenant accounts receivable.

I'm not a thousand percent sure on this number based upon a report I just received.

But as of last week, our tenant accounts receivable was at $92,000.

That is the amount of rent that's owed from tenants to the housing authority.

This is also the most worrying indicator that we have.

We have to get our TARS down.

It's one of the issues that have been flagged by HUD.

They ask us about it every other week.

are currently working through the Rent Relief Program to get funding and asking other sources as well to assist families that are delinquent.

Crescent Hall's update.

We currently have under 18 families in the building, and only three of them are actively searching for a home.

Everyone else have found a location and have a move in date, or they're just waiting on a move in date to move into their new homes.

So we are on schedule to get the building emptied by the end of the year.

The contractor has noted if we do turn the building over to them sooner, we will be able to reoccupy the entire building sooner and maybe on schedule based upon the original contract.

One of the items that did not come up tonight, we've received a lot of complaints about our trash on site, especially at West Haven and at South First Street behind the 904-902 building.

So we're working with the trash company to address the issues.

The contract identifies the trash company cleaning around the trash bays after dumping the dumpster.

That has not been happening.

So we are in talks with them about that.

We're also working with residents to create a resident stipend program where the residents are also a part of taking care of the site while also hiring at least one more maintenance employee to also help assist with that.

And that will be at all the sites.

But one of the bigger issues we've had lately has been at West Haven.

Not all of the issue is CRHA.

The Peloton has two dumpsters that block Run Street.

I've tried numerous times to get in contact with the owner.

He doesn't come in until 1 o'clock.

The business doesn't open until 4 o'clock.

They don't answer calls between 1 and 4.

Red Hub has also been an issue.

They park a vehicle right in front of our dumpster, which has blocked the trash company from removing the dumpster and dumping it a couple of times.

I've taken pictures.

I've been in contact with them as well.

And we have now placed a concrete barrier in front of that parking space to block anyone from blocking the dumpster.

So we are working to address that issue.

I know it didn't come up, but I know a lot of residents listened to the meeting afterwards.

So I wanted to make that announcement.

The HCV department, give an update there, they're 100% complete in HUS inspections and 100% on recertifications.

Those were annual recertifications.

Those were two big items that were dinged on the audits from HUD.

So the department is 100% complete on both of those.

They currently have 447 vouchers to lease, which is approximately an 80 voucher increase from this time last year.

I had one question.

No, we're looking to find assistance for families that are delinquent through the rental relief program from the state and other means.

But no, HUD has been on us to get the accounts down because they went from $0 in June and July to over $90,000 in a few months.

That usually helps.

Yes.

And so our towing contractor is, I don't think he's able to satisfy our needs.

Every time I call they're short drivers and it takes multiple hours to get to us.

Plus we have a agreement with them where they cannot tow until after nine.

So I'm looking to change that.

because now they're really restricted.

I mean, most of the complaints I hear about West Haven are UVA students parking and taking up their parking spots.

And with our current contractor and our contract with them, it says that, I mean, they can't even respond to that until after 9 p.m.

So it's something that we need to change on our end.

They said it, they received some type of documents from us a couple of years ago or three years ago saying that we didn't want them towing until after 9 p.m.

I'm pretty sure we can find somebody to be happy to tow for us.

Any other questions?

Thank you, Mr.

Sales.

There we go.

Been having some issues with Zoom this week.

Good evening, commissioners.

I'm Brandon Collins.

I'm your redevelopment coordinator for CRHA and just going to give a quick update.

I'm hoping you all saw the newsletter update that went out earlier today.

That's actually the second one we've done.

My hope is to get that out twice a month, somewhere around board meetings, somewhere around

Redevelopment Committee meetings.

But I've been busy working through the action plan that John and Kathleen had for me.

One thing I'm pretty excited about moving forward is the engaging English learners plan.

So we have a plan still putting in some process and infrastructure, but for the most part, ready to launch

communication with some of our public housing residents.

There's been some hiccups on some of the languages, particularly Farsi that's still working through, but very excited to be able to start using that and making that a reality so we can better engage residents.

So just real quick, Crescent Halls, John reported

Clearing out the building is going really well and in pretty short order.

So that is really amazing.

And as a result, it does sound like we can get construction and completion of the building a little closer to the original schedule.

They'll be working with GMA to finalize a revised schedule and scope of work and hopefully

By the end of the year, we'll have that schedule in place and hoping to hit November of next year for completion.

The x-rays of the pipes happened above the first floor.

As you know, we're replacing all the pipes in the building with the exception of some pipes above the first floor that

appear to be extremely sturdy and better quality than what we would replace them with.

So they've gone through and X-rayed those and we're waiting on the results for that.

But that plan has moved forward.

So first phase two, as you may be aware, our hang-ups getting a site plan amendment, we're finally gotten past.

So they are now able to prepare the land where building three is supposed to go and that work is proceeding.

That helps things move forward a little better, still a little bit behind schedule, but they can begin that work.

Buildings one and two are really starting to turn into buildings.

If you drive by there, you'll see some brick going up, the windows are in, the roofs are

mainly completed, and that's super exciting.

Phase two, as John mentioned, the demo-dispo application and mixed finance application have gone in.

It took a lot of doing to figure out the mixed finance application, but what we've landed on is phase two, we'll have 20 public housing units, 38 project-based vouchers,

and 55 non-subsidized units.

We are evaluating how low we can get those rents down for those non-subsidized units, but it appears that we can get those down pretty low.

So that's a good thing.

We have pre-construction services lined up for South First Street phase two, as well as Sixth Street.

And that will help

get pricing on track for phase two of South First Street and just general constructability and maybe find some ways to save some money through value engineering.

There will be, we have scheduled a resident relocation meeting for South First Street phase two.

And the plan is to have two meetings on December 15th.

That will be the first step in developing a relocation plan that I believe this board will approve.

But we need to have that in hand and submit it to HUD.

But we got to have those resident meetings to make sure that we're doing everything we can to include residents and make sure they're taken care of.

Sixth Street,

is moving forward.

There's a site plan submitted to the city for approval for a first phase, what we call Building A.

Building A is going to be there, kind of a long Monticello and sort of wrapping around the corner onto Sixth Street will be four stories with 50 homes.

We'll have an elevator and parking

underneath.

It will have 19 one bedroom, six two bedrooms and 25 three bedroom apartments.

There's a lot of community space on the ground floor for kids and grownups and all that.

And just recently we discussed and sort of did more details for what the outside of that building is going to have a really

Amazingly cool outside community space with some terraces and big play areas and basketball court.

Along with that, a master plan for the full site is being developed.

If you see the newsletter, you can sort of see a picture of

where things are headed with it.

You know, nothing's set in stone, but we're envisioning on the farther side of the site, a second apartment building.

It will be a little smaller than building A and we're calling that building B.

And in between we'll have somewhere on 20 to 25 townhomes of which right now we're looking at six of those being set aside as home ownership townhomes.

and residents have been participating fairly well in that process as well.

Excited to say we do have a timeline for West Haven and the idea is we'll be shooting for a LIHTC application for a first phase West Haven in March, 2024.

The idea is we can get started with engagement

Pick up some speed on engagement in the spring, select an architect and go full on resident planning to develop a master plan and a site plan for a first phase of West Haven.

And super also excited about the parallel track moving forward.

This board has talked about the parallel track for a long time.

What is the parallel track?

That is for scattered sites, mainly those sites that aren't going to see a full-on tear down and rebuild anytime soon, but which also deserve a lot of attention with renovations.

And so the idea is we're gonna find out priorities for residents and move forward through a process of similar,

A resident-led process for our scattered sites.

And we started with engagement on that and that's going to pick up steam and some of that's going to correspond with the capital fund that we will also be working with residents on, kind of wrap those things together.

Looking forward,

Some things to think about.

We're gonna need to dig in a little bit or a lot bit on our financing and our use of subsidies at Sixth Street.

It's an opportunity to catch up on our fair cloth or at least not get any deeper in the hole on our fair cloth count, which is your public housing count.

For those who don't know, there was a law passed

You can't have any more public housing than you already had since October 1st, 1999.

We've kind of got some in a bucket just waiting around.

We don't want to go deeper into that bucket.

And we do have a lot to think about about how we empty that bucket at some point.

We'll be coming back to you with more information about West Haven and a kickoff.

around this spring, South First Street phase two relocation plan.

We will begin planning for use of the capital fund pretty soon, pretty much once you're done with the annual plan, hopefully we'll have a capital plan in your hands.

We've mostly determined what we're doing about utilities.

We've got a long ways to go on figuring out some transit things.

and of course, programming and partners.

And so I'm excited to say we're also doing engagement starting right now with South First Street and Sixth Street on what programming, what partners, what services are important to residents on the various sites and that will better help the resident services committee and everyone be able to get the right programs and the right partners involved.

When you convert the units over to LIHTC and they go to vouchers, those numbers, can those be counted as public housing residents?

There's a...

That's a hard question to answer.

It really depends on, kind of depends on the site and what we're replacing.

HUD doesn't want any additional subsidy, whether it's public housing or voucher, Section 8 housing.

So at 6th Street, for example, there's 25 public housing units.

They're not gonna want to see

more than 25 subsidized from HUD units no matter what pile of money it's coming from them.

And that is disappointing.

The opportunity there is that we can expand the amount of housing overall on the site so that we won't have to rely, we can make decisions about public housing to preserve more public housing because we're kind of creating our own subsidy

And I'll touch on that a little bit more.

So HUD will allow us to add more subsidized units to the site if we're removing them from our housing choice voucher portfolio.

So

HUD says, hey, you have this many vouchers you can lease up.

I think our countdown is 553, I believe.

I may be off on that by a little bit, because it is changing based upon the addition of tenant protection vouchers at Crescent Halls, plus additional vouchers we're receiving from mainstream emergency housing vouchers.

So these special vouchers.

increasing.

So we can use those vouchers to cover additional subsidy on the non subsidized units, but they aren't going to provide

the additional subsidy.

So what your current site has, so at 6th Street is 25.

That's all they will fund, but you can fund additional ones by reducing your tenant based vouchers.

So you can project base some of those vouchers on the site anyway.

And nine times out of 10, those vouchers will end up back in a CRHA property anyway, due to the

the market supply of landlord owned units.

The rent for those units are constantly going up.

And so later on, we're gonna, it won't be at this meeting, but in a couple of meetings from now, we're gonna put in front of you the,

The housing assistance payments and the payment standard for HCV.

And so HUD actually reduced the rents on those this year.

So while the actual market is increasing, sometimes $100 to $200 per unit size, HUD is actually reducing the eligible

The number of units that are eligible by reducing the payment standard for those units.

So the more units we build, even if they're not subsidized, nine times out of 10, they will be subsidized just because there's no other units to attach that voucher to.

We have vouchers that turn over all the time because individuals are having a hard time

And sometimes it's not just that the unit's not there, it's because they have barriers in place that we are more flexible with.

So we're more flexible when it comes to some of the background checks and credit scores.

I mean, there are some apartment complexes that won't touch a tenant if their credit score is in 650 or higher.

So they've added these additional barriers in place to make it harder for individuals to lease units with vouchers

while we've removed those barriers and we're also building the unit.

Thank you.

Public comments?

I'm not seeing any hands raised.

Somebody send it to me.

Oh, it's there now.

Okay.

I'll go there after I leave this.

I move that the board enter closed session pursuant to Virginia code section 223711A1 for purposes of discussing the performance and contract of the executive director.

And I get a second beyond Socrates.

Okay.

I'll see you guys in a few.

Yes.

I think we should.

Yes.