Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board Meeting   2/24/2025

Okay, I think this is, am I on?

I don't know.

Okay, I'm gonna call the meeting to order.

Who's, if Maria's not here, who's?

Okay, thanks Mr.

Present.

Here.

Present.

okay we'll do a moment of silence okay our next regular board work session will be on Thursday March the 13th at 6 p.m. our next regular board meeting will be Monday March 24th at 6 p.m.

We have the Redevelopment Committee meeting every first Thursday of the month.

The next one will be March 6th at 3 o'clock.

Our Admin Redevelopment meeting is every third Thursday.

So the next one will be March 20th at 1.

Safety Committee is every second Wednesday with the next one March 12th at noon.

And Resident Services is every second Tuesday with the next one March 11th at 1 o'clock.

I will now open up for public comments followed by FAR comments.

Wait a minute.

I'm Annette Wilcox.

I miss seeing some stores being closed down, that roses department store, and I was wondering if there's, it's hard for me to shop cheaply, the downtown mall.

And if I

Hi, my name is Emily Dreyfus.

I'm an organizer with Legal Aid Justice Center and on PHAR's Advisory Council.

and I wasn't able to attend the eviction work session so I'm sorry that I'm not better informed but I wanted to just ask some follow-up questions and get a little more clarity.

For one question that I had was from a public comment that I made I think it was last month about a resident who had a $70 balance, but CRHA pursued the eviction and I just wanted to make sure that you all can drill down into where the discretion points are and especially for non-payment and whether it's

expected that CRHA will try to get possession whenever possible so that if someone messes up again they can be evicted on an incredibly short timeline.

And I think it's three days.

And this, even though non-payment is a very challenging issue for CRHA, and I know that HUD very much doesn't want to see people accruing balances

In this climate where affordable housing is incredibly scarce and also just not available, like most of the housing that's available on the market is way out of reach of the average housing authority tenant.

I think the last time I saw housing authority income information, the average was something like $12,000 a year.

So someone earning even 20 or $30,000 a year is not gonna be able to afford

So it has dire consequences for kids, for our elders and just for homelessness overall because CRHA is often the housing of last resort.

The other thoughts I had were whether you all have with all of the great supportive services that are now available whether it's looked at as like the first step of self-sufficiency is being able to pay your rent or one of the first steps and if people are eligible for the supportive services when they're having difficulty paying and that might be

something that staff could monitor the eviction docket or coordinate with the property managers to identify people who are having challenges paying off their balance or keeping up with their rent and do more wraparound services to help folks in that situation because really like when someone's making an effort I really hope that the housing authority will

Grant and Grace and you know even if they can't pay off every penny that the Housing Authority won't be aggressive about trying to get possession.

I also wondered about whether there are some areas for improving communication and having consistent systems so that if there are property managers that are

supposed to be following a certain procedure if that's being monitored and reported onto you all or to their supervisors to make sure that people are actually getting the prevention help that they

are supposed to get and that they clearly need in order to avoid homelessness because I've just heard through the grapevine some things about people who were uninformed or who attempted to communicate with CRHA and didn't get callbacks and I spoke with one person whose mom is severely incapacitated at this point and she thought they were all squared away and to learn that they were on the docket again

She was just really shocked and scared and I hope that that sort of thing is very rare and can be prevented by having some more supportive services.

All right, thanks very much.

Oh, I did want to add one other thing.

I was able to attend a West Haven resident planners meeting last week and I hadn't been in months and months because PHAR is now better staffed and so Latricia has been attending those meetings

and Wendy from the PHAR staff.

So I hadn't been in a long time, but I was so pleased to see the level of participation.

And there were lots of residents in the meeting.

I was part of a breakout room that had lots of residents participating and, you know, drilling down into things that it was just really great to see.

Thank you.

Open up to respond because Emily had made a bunch of comments or questions so I wanted to give Miss Banks, I was going to give my interpretation from last week but Miss Banks is on the phone and Mr.

Sales is here so I'll let them respond.

I think that there was a question around as short as three days and I believe that that is only in an emergency and safe situation so that's not a pay situation was my understanding and then

So we do have a 72 hour eviction process for situations that we consider dire.

Those are going to be your incidents with guns, your incidents with violence on the sites.

It has been rarely used, super rare that we've actually used it.

and you also mentioned eviction at a very small dollar amount of $70.

We'll say we proceed to eviction after it's beyond two months of rent and I cannot say that this situation just involved money.

A majority of the evictions that we've been proceeding with aggressively had been because there's other incidents going on site where there's safety concerns.

This tenant may have just also owed us money at the same time.

We have over 100 tenants that actively owe us or could be at risk of eviction.

We don't proceed with evicting everyone.

And I'll let Kathleen talk about some of the things we're doing with our resident service coordinators and property managers in conjunction together.

So ensure eviction isn't the first step or the second step.

It's the absolute last step.

and everything else has failed and we can't proceed any further.

Emily, I don't know if you got the email from the presentation and so I just forwarded it to you.

But really, Miss Banks was able to break down a whole process for how evictions work.

And, you know, generally not a lot of things happen until after at least 30 days.

With the new system we're doing for eviction diversion is we're working on making sure a referral happens before that point, before it goes to court to resident services so that we can follow up.

As John was speaking on, there are some exceptions around health and safety and that's handled very differently.

And resident services is not always involved if that is the situation, especially around gun violence.

but in other situations we're setting up a new system so that we can get involved and that we can try to work with the families, see if there's a need for, if there's a local agency which can be hard to find that can help them or if we could work on being another party to talk to them about maybe considering a repayment agreement.

We often have a lot of folks who don't respond to that request and sometimes having

We're also looking at situations where a lease violation was in place and how we can intervene and see if there's education required around the lease, if there's mediation needed.

just what needs to come into play.

We're going to be also starting a monthly meeting with resident services and property management to really work on some teamwork.

a lot of housing authorities report that those two departments don't always work all together because one they feel is pushing and the other is trying to keep in.

We want to do things differently here.

So we are looking, we've been working on this for a couple months now.

We have a referral form that we're going to be training staff on next week and we're hoping to start to launch this process.

But I didn't know if Miss Banks wanted to say anything.

Yes, let me pull up my notes.

So let's see, as Kathleen said and Mr.

Sales said, a 72-hour immediate eviction is a very different process due to the nature of

the non-compliance and I just wanted to reiterate what Mr.

Sales said $70 seems like a small amount however that could be two months of rent for someone so I did want to clarify that as well if they're on a $35 rent schedule then that's two months of rent the eviction diversion program

should be active next week as Kathleen alluded to in the referral forms.

We'll be doing a team training with both teams.

And to Ms. Streifus' comment, we do have communications and systems in place, yes.

And we do have a specific process that the staff has been trained on and will continue to be trained on.

But I also want to say that if something is not happening,

Please feel free to reach out to myself or get a message to Ms. Carey or Mr.

Sales and they can get it to me.

I can provide my email.

Please reach out to me and let me know so that I can check in with the team and I can make sure that those things are happening.

And I was going to go over this in the property management portion, but I do want to say that out of all of the unlawful detainers that we've filed over the past few months for severely delinquent rent or noncompliance issues,

We have only had three actual evictions and out of those three, two of the families moved prior to the share of showing up.

So I'd say that that is a significant win for us as an agency and supporting the communities that we serve every day.

So I did want to reiterate that because I think that's super important.

to know that we are trying to go above and beyond and understand that it's not just lease enforcement, but this is a service to our community.

Yes, we work there, but we serve the community.

And it's always our goal, if at all possible, to keep the families in place.

So I'm wondering if we could maybe get some clarity for the board.

First of all, about what next steps are for the eviction diversion program.

I know there was going to be a board, there's been talk about that, it would be helpful to know about that.

And then we had said in a prior meeting, we had asked something similar to what Miss Dreyfus is bringing up about.

Can we as a board see when people are coming up on the eviction docket some way of understanding

Yes, we've confirmed like this conversation was had that we can see the steps.

So we see that like there is some follow through.

We can make sure that people aren't following through the cracks.

And so I'm wondering if there's been any movement on what that might look like on our end so that we can make sure as a board that we're remaining accountable.

And last, I understand that $70 might be two months of rent, but that still seems like a really small amount.

And I'm wondering if we can get some policies around because that two months is gonna look really different.

And if somebody is really trying to get it

Together, I would like us as an agency to be able to work with them if we could have some clear policies that we as a board would see about what is the, like is there a dollar amount?

Well, I think Delphine's gonna jump on it because that's gonna be a fair housing issue.

Okay.

Because $70, if you use an imaginary threshold of dollar amount,

A minimum rent is $35.

If you say it's $350, they can live for 10 months for free.

But what about that family whose rent is $1,000 for one month?

They don't have that leeway.

Yeah, I'm on.

Thank you, John.

That's absolutely right.

It would be a fair housing violation if we start treating tenants differently.

But I want to make it clear for the benefit of the board and others that we do not evict someone who owes $70 if they're willing to work with the housing authority on a repayment agreement.

We give residents extensions as long as they're making efforts and continue to communicate with staff.

We will give them more time.

We will take small payments if they want to pay $15 at a time or things like that.

We tailor those repayment agreements to the situation of each household.

So it is not like someone owes $70 and we're going to put them on the street the week after.

And it seems to me listening to the comments that that's the perception.

Please note that's not accurate.

We work very hard with the families.

CRHA staff does a great job staying in touch with the households to make sure that for the households that are interested in working with us on the repayment agreement,

We make that available to them.

We also provide counseling and resources for households to get access to other pots of money that could help them with their rent.

And I think depending on

the level how far down we go for the different phases of folks eviction process we could do that I think if it goes it's okay if we're looking at each individual family and we're then giving that to the board I think we're going to have an issue with confidentiality as well

and so I think we can figure out like hey we have this many folks in this process stepwise we could do that I will say folks are continuously going through those steps so let's say when we do have a family who is at risk that referral process has been made

We cannot force the person to work with Kathleen's group.

We can't force them to communicate with Kathleen.

We can't force them to apply to the funding resources that we partner with, with Goodwill, with Salvation Army, with the churches.

We can't force anyone to do that.

We have done applications ourselves, referred folks.

We've referred folks at FOC that has provided money, but we can't force anyone.

And so folks may be engaged at the beginning and we have a track for them and like, hey, you know, you, this person brings in a thousand, you do this and they will do this.

So they're in this track and then that person brings in theirs and then it's ghosts, it goes quiet.

And so then that person falls out of that step and then we then have to proceed in the next step in a different process.

So that is a constant flow of people moving through this process.

This beast that we have, we kind of sort of helped create it ourselves.

And so now we're trying to

Rangelit in and we're bringing these resources to the folks in the community and we've made this investment with the resident service coordinators that are site-based, specific for each community so the residents have someone they can go to that's not the property manager where they can have a better relationship and try to build that relationship as this is a person that can help me.

Yes, I just wanted to say to Mr.

Sales' point that property management and resident services are working hand in hand on this.

And I also wanted to clarify that although we work very closely with agencies, some of our residents have

kind of worn out their welcome with the agencies or for whatever reason, they don't qualify for the funding multiple times.

So some of the agencies have caps on what they can receive in a year.

So if you get a certain lump sum of money and it goes to a certain max amount, they do not qualify with that agency to get any more assistance.

So all that has to be taken into consideration.

Also with repayment plans,

If you breach the repayment plan, you may not requalify for the repayment plan.

So there are a lot of variables when it comes to that.

And I was going to wait until later to say this, but in the last month alone, property management, along with the residents, more so led by asset collections, has gotten almost $20,000 in assistance for our families.

And that's in one month.

trying to keep families in place.

And a majority of the footwork was done by staff.

And so I think it's super important, again, to highlight that, that we go, we strive to go above and beyond.

And again, not just be property management, but to be partners with the resident services and go back and forth so that

These become general practices where this is the norm.

Yeah, thank you.

So what I'm wondering, what are the next steps?

So we are working on the form that's going to be, the staff are going to get trained on.

The staff, the property managers can then start referring folks over to the coordinators who are going to be meeting with the property managers monthly to just check in, make sure everyone

and the rest of everything, any challenging cases that they have and any other new resources that may be coming to bear and any resources that may be dwindling down in funding, having that conversation.

But we're at the point where we're ready to roll it out and start serving folks in the official eviction diversion program.

But we've already been doing eviction diversion work for like the last two or three years.

We've gotten over $300,000 in funds

to cover residents' rent that were delinquent over the last few years.

Okay, thank you.

Yes, hi, good evening, everyone.

I just wanted to comment on, give me one quick second, I just have to re-pull it back up, but one of the things that I wanted to uplift is some of our winter youth programming that's been going on and we are just trying to make sure that we're getting some things for our youngest residents.

So on the 26th, there's going to be a Move and Groove Games, which is going to be on Zoom.

We have another winter collage event that we will be doing to drop off kids to families.

So also if they can head to our Instagram to find out more information on how to sign up to register.

because that's the only thing that really does need to be registered so they know where to drop off some of those collage kits and then there's going to be another Zoom scavenger hunt on the 19th so that is just a little bit of our youngest residents and then also just updating you all on

Our internship program that our residents have been working towards.

They've been doing a great job.

They had done a computer literacy event where they were learning to access and how to utilize the computer in a much better way.

and a lot of our interns really that was something that they requested along with interviewing skills and they had a leadership class to help them in situations to be better leaders in many spaces so those are just some of the things that we have coming that they've done and they'll be doing some a little bit more in the community so you will be seeing our interns out a little bit more and then I also lastly wanted to echo Emily's comments on

working with residents in the planners meetings.

She was able to attend for me this past week, but also even in the First Street planners,

meetings.

We've just really been having great conversations and just I'm excited for the way that it's been moving.

So I just wanted to echo that in the meetings that we've been able to be present, residents are asking more questions, being more engaged, and we are just really happy to be assisting and helping with that.

So that is all I have from a far end.

And I appreciate the collaborative efforts that we are really working towards making.

and everything better for both our residents and advocacy on all fronts.

Thank you.

Okay.

I'll now open it up for any updates from commissioners.

All right.

OK.

I can just speak up.

All right, I'll make this short and sweet.

I'm not going to go over the whole audit with you.

We're getting close to closing out, 331.25.

So I'll just do a quick overview.

We had a clean audit opinion.

No findings this year.

We found no instances of fraud, abuse, or misappropriation of assets.

No disagreements of management.

And then as far as financially, I didn't have any concerns from a year-over-year perspective or anything of that nature.

I know you guys have had some turnover there in the finance department, but I think you're in pretty good hands now with TC and his team.

I know there's some growing pains and some learning and that sort of thing, so I think as time goes on, he'll get more familiarity with how everything is working and the authority, and so I think it'll kind of continue to improve

Can we give a round of applause?

Yeah.

That's great.

Well done, y'all.

So I think I'm missing on some history as a newer commissioner.

We were having trouble with everything.

But thank you.

I know it's a big endeavor.

I realize that stuff is changing rapidly on the federal level, and so it's hard to keep on tapping.

But thank you for being so diligent.

And then any highlights?

Yeah.

No, I don't have anything to highlight out of that.

The only thing, you know, kind of the one thing I'll say as far as, you know, closing out 331-25 and that process is just, you guys have a lot of development stuff going on with these tax credit audits, Southburst 1 and 2 and Crescent, and it's just making sure that

that the development items that is kind of also part of the authority just make sure making sure that it's getting booked on the authority and as well you know some of its sponsor loans that are you know they kind of it's not really a loan you're expecting to pay back from those entities per se but but it kind of runs through the authority as like a grant

and then it's a loan to these partnerships which is that's kind of for tax purposes but just making sure you know all those loans get on there and everything is um kind of tied out as far as that whole thing goes.

Also I just want to say no findings and we closed all our findings that's pretty great.

One of the things mentioned in the highlights is for the fiscal year, CRHA is still in troubled status under HUD.

So we're not in troubled status, it's substandard physical conditions is the status we have.

Everything closed out except for our physical inspections.

So when they did the physical inspections, we failed.

And that was two years ago.

It wasn't the inspection that we just did.

In 2024, it was 2023's inspections.

And so in 2024, that won't be an issue because Wes Haven received a 90, Crescent Halls received a 91 or 92, South First Street received a 88,

Sixth Street received a score of like 20, but once they did their review of the inspection, they deemed the inspection was a bad inspection and they're asking to come out to reinspect.

The 100 is the highest.

And so we've drastically improved every score except Sixth Street, and I think in four we received a 40.

but that was before we went through with the new inspection because they went from a REAC inspection to now doing a INSPIRE inspection so it's a whole new scoring system the way they look at the unit is different they used to score the outside of the unit really heavy and now they went away from that and now they scored the inside of the unit really heavy and the outside not as heavy.

and so it's a drastic change and so we've now gone through all of our units but that new mindset and the scores that we're getting now is in line with going through with that new standard and so I know we'll close out and get to at least a standard performer.

My hopes are get to a high performer.

One of the big indicators that will keep us from getting there is the tentative accounts receivable is entirely too high.

Ours is way above the standard.

I think we're probably close to 10%.

And so you're more than double the standard.

And I think Jake can tell you how heavy they weigh, the 10 that Council receivable, and the number of Vicky units as well.

And that's in the Public Housing Assessment System, PHAS scores?

I think I pretty much touched on the things that I was going to highlight, but I do want to ask board members, the commissioners, PHAR, if

If anyone, any of the residents reach out, please encourage the residents to come to the security meeting.

We have that once a month.

And I think it's important with the activity that's going on on the sites.

Even if they want to join anonymously and just listen and then provide feedback anonymously, we need we need the input.

We need the information, even if it's anonymous, to

and get buy-in into our own communities.

So that's a big one because it's usually just us and maybe one resident or two residents.

So we would like to see the families get a little more involved in that.

I know it's a touchy subject, but it's gonna take all of us to do it.

I'm just wondering about the safety meetings.

So it had been me and Commissioner Wicks who have been going back and forth and the time has changed.

We can work together to see like I'll sometimes be able to make, well now I'm realizing I'm teaching at that same time.

Anyway, we can try to figure things out.

But I'm wondering, are people primarily joining via Zoom coming in person?

Primarily on Zoom.

Okay.

Although to be completely fair, the last few that I attended,

saying people weren't joining is generous, but joining it all.

Hence the encouragement for people to join.

I'm just wondering maybe if that's something PHAR could help with?

Yeah.

If we could work with PHAR.

Mr.

Okay, thank you.

I'll handle that.

I really don't have much of an update on HCV program.

We are currently still projecting a shortfall of HCV.

I think we are projecting a little bit over $300,000 for a shortfall for this upcoming year.

So we'll be working with HUD on that.

We haven't been given a shortfall.

a appointee yet, an assignment, and so once we get that, then we'll work with that individual to assess the shortfall, figure out what preventative measures we can put in place, which there aren't many, and then move forward in that process.

Why is it so much better?

HUD increased the dollar amount that we were receiving, and so we had a new baseline, but then based on that baseline and an inflationary factor, it still put us at a shortfall.

And so we increased our baseline budget by about a million dollars, and we're still projecting a shortfall.

And so that has a lot to do with the families that we're serving being lower income,

at the extremely low income and then the units that we're filling are higher priced units and so the housing authority is playing a larger delta and so we're seeing that we've also increased the number of vouchers and so that has not helped the issue but we started increasing the number of vouchers we had leased up three, four years ago and we weren't running into the shortfall.

We still have 1,700 families on the wait list.

We are only pulling, well, we are not pulling anyone at the moment, but we'll only pull once we are under shortfall.

The SISRAP program has 68 families housed with a monthly contribution of about $70,000.

The goal is to get SISRAP to 75 families housed.

All right, TC you look ready.

Thrilled.

So I don't have a whole lot.

Jake kind of talked about our audit a little bit.

We are wrapping up the audits for South First Street Phase 1 and Crescent Halls.

Those should be ready here, you know, I think they go for 15 deadlines.

Okay.

Awesome.

All right, Mr.

And I'll try to make my update a little bit longer than TC's.

So at the last meeting last Thursday, we talked about the SOP.

We are still on schedule to have that back to the board at the meeting in March, March 24th.

It will be a presentation.

It won't be a vote.

on the document because the document should be a living document that we're changing as we go through the process and figure out what's not working, what is working.

On that, thank you for sharing the sample with us.

It is very thorough and I think just dramatically improves our business continuity overall.

You can see why.

It's going to be meaningful.

So I think once we get a full, full document that goes through all the departments, we'll have a resource that any new hire could pick up and say, OK, how do I buy something?

Oh, well, here.

Is it more than 10,000?

Well, this is the process I follow.

And so that's really good.

And we're really excited.

The whole team has been working really hard.

to get us there.

Every department has spent hours meeting with the consultant at a minimum of two to three hours each time.

Just finished one meeting with them earlier today.

I think we have another one with them tomorrow.

And I think Kathleen, you have with them coming up as well.

And so we are slated to finish that on time.

Another comment that's come up a lot is what's going on with federal government and spending.

And so

Who knows?

Who knows?

Yes, that's the answer.

That is the right answer.

Who knows?

So about a month ago, TC and I spent a couple hours banging our heads on the table, trying to figure out what are we going to do with the money that we need to pay the landlords to come in on Saturday or Monday.

And checks had to be cut on Friday.

We have thought about that and figured out what it would look like.

That is not something we want to talk about because it has impacts on folks' lives.

And so we can have that conversation.

but the conversations that I've had like with Delphine and her office, conversations I've had with HUD is you all have a contract that says that you have this obligation from the federal government.

Please proceed with doing the work.

And so that's the direction that we're going to continue moving forward.

Like we're not slowing down our operations because it means that we're taking Laura to get folks the things that they need in order to be successful.

And so we're doing it the opposite.

We're going to speed up because what we know we have now is what we have.

And so we're going to make sure we can spend as much of what we can spend as possible.

And so that's really the direction we're taking on that.

Next month, it's a really big month.

You'll have your CFP budget.

coming to you guys, your five year plan for public hearing and your regular budget, your annual budget which has some big investments to ensure that we're continuing to provide a better service to residents both in the office and when maintenance comes to the unit to do work.

And so next month is gonna be really heavy.

If folks have questions or comments or

about anything that you had today with the audit or what we have coming up with the budgets, feel free to reach out to me or TC, I don't know if I want to throw you out there, but TC is also available if needed to answer any questions in those two fields.

Yeah, we have, one of our investments was we hired a resident interpretator, translator, sorry.

and then we also hired a language access coordinator and so they have been working to translate every document that we have working with the property management staff to ensure that we have folks in there in the meetings to help represent or help interpret when we have

have presence in meetings in with the Redevelopment Department.

They've been attending like the West Haven planners meetings to ensure that everyone in the community has an opportunity to participate in redevelopment.

All right.

Thank you very much, Mr.

Sales.

Okay, I will open it back up for any additional public comment.

Okay, that concludes our agenda for this evening.

All in favor?

Aye.

Thank you everyone.