Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Work Session   1/15/2026

We were like, I don't see the benefit to this particular exercise.

Incredible.

Yeah, well but it looks so compelling until I've like unlocked it in the holiday on my calendar because...

It's wide open.

Do we?

Three?

I guess maybe four.

Okay, good.

I know, I've been staring at it.

Where all the best treasures are found.

The fifth street one is a disaster.

Yes.

Like I watched all these things to do crafts with Dollar Tree stuff and then I like went to get it and the line was three of like the whole store and I was like I can't, I don't want to do the craft anymore.

Yeah.

It's not worth it.

And they don't have a self-checkout.

Poor person.

He was handling all of the people, yeah.

The arms are uneven.

It's bothering me.

It's fine.

Welcome.

All right.

That gives us a quorum.

Well, he had said he was.

OK, I will call our meeting to order.

Here.

Commissioner Raudales.

OK. Can we have a moment of silence, please?

Okey dokey.

So we are going to move to a brief closed session.

Be it resolved that the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority will convene in a closed meeting pursuant to the Virginia Freedom of Information Act as amended to discuss the following matters which are specifically exempted from public disclosure by the code section referenced to below.

Personnel matters involving the assignment, appointment, promotion, demotion, performance, salaries, or resignation

of Employees of the Authority, as authorized by Section 2.3-3711A1 of the Act.

Second?

All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed?

All right.

We will be right back.

I'm sorry I wasn't ignoring you guys.

I just didn't see any of the things.

Alrighty.

So whereas the authority has convened a closed meeting on the state pursuant to an affirmative recorded vote and in accordance with the provisions of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and whereas Section 2.2-3712D of the 1950 Code of Virginia

as amended requires a certification by this authority that such closed meeting was conducted in conformity with Virginia law.

Now, therefore, upon motion duly made and seconded be it resolved that the authority hereby certifies that to the best of each commissioner's knowledge, one, only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements by Virginia law were heard, discussed, or

considered in the closed meeting, and two, only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered by the authority.

All in favor?

Yes.

All opposed?

Okay, Miss Carnes, are you there?

All right.

We are ready for you to train us.

Okay.

Does everyone have a copy of the PowerPoint presentation or do you have it on the screen in the room?

Yes.

We have copies of it.

Yeah.

Yes, I'm going to try to do that.

Can you see my screen?

There it is.

Yes, ma'am.

Great, great.

Well, good evening to everyone and thank you for having me.

So for some of you, this may be duplicative of a training you received from me a few years ago.

So I guess for some of you, it will be a refresher.

It is an updated version of the training and then for some of the new work commissioners who were not on the board when I last provided the training a couple years ago, then this will be perhaps new information or perhaps something that you already knew but maybe not in the context of a housing authority.

So today we're going to cover basically the information about what is CRHA, what is the role of public housing agencies and how they work because they're a little bit of a different animal so to speak.

Then we will go through the powers that CRHA has.

And then, and most importantly, we will go through your role as a commissioner, your responsibilities.

And we will talk about two of the main bodies of rules that are the most relevant to commissioners.

One is the Freedom of Information Act and the other is issues involving conflicts of interests.

So first, what is the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority?

Well, it's a public housing authority, which is defined on this slide.

The important piece to remember is that public housing authorities are creatures of statutes, meaning unlike corporations or LLCs, they are governed by the statutes that create public housing authorities, and they only have the powers

that the statutes give them.

They are governmental agencies and instrumentalities of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

In Virginia you can be both a redevelopment and a housing authority, which is why your name is CRHA.

That's not true everywhere around the country.

In some states you can only be a housing authority, which is important because in those states that means housing authorities cannot engage in any redevelopment activity.

So at the federal level, housing authorities were created back in 1937 by the Federal Housing Act.

That only authorized housing authorities at the federal level, meaning that then it was up to the states to decide whether or not they wanted housing authorities to exist.

So that happened the very next year for the Commonwealth of Virginia and Title 36 of the Virginia Code was created specifically to govern housing authorities.

But again, at that point, they were only created, so to speak, or made available at the state level.

It was then up to each locality to decide whether or not to have a housing authority.

For Charlottesville, that occurred in 1954

and CRHA was activated.

And we used the term activated because, again, housing authorities are creatures of statute.

You do not register with the Virginia State Corporation Commission.

You have to be created by statute and then activated at a local level by the municipality.

On that point, it's important to note that not every city or county in the Commonwealth has a housing authority.

Some cities have chosen to not have a housing authority, for example, Virginia Beach, and then a lot of other cities do have housing authorities.

But it's interesting as you look at the entire Commonwealth of Virginia to see which areas have housing authorities and which do not.

So what can CRHA do?

Unlike corporations or LLCs, where you can create a corporation and an LLC and it's allowed to do everything unless it's prohibited, with regard to housing authorities, it's the opposite.

You cannot do anything unless the statute says that you can.

So for us, we look at Title 36 of the Virginia Code and it enumerates the powers of housing authorities in the Commonwealth of Virginia

and then federal statutes have some limitations with regard to how these powers can be exercised.

For historical purposes, you'll see on this slide, it lists the levels of authority and activity that were authorized by Congress and it's interesting because you can see that housing authorities were basically created to handle housing matters and that was in 1938.

and then interestingly after World War II, redevelopment projects were added as an additional layer of authorized activity for housing authorities and then conservation projects came last in 1964.

So what is a housing project?

That's a term of art which is why I put it in italics.

You will hear sometimes

People refer to housing project.

It's important to be specific when we use those terms because those terms come from statutes and we have to really abide by the terms of the statutes in order for a housing authority to be allowed to participate.

So on this slide, you have the definition of a housing project.

And some of you may be familiar with the phrase, decent, safe and sanitary housing.

That comes from the statute that initially created this layer of activity as an authorized part of the work of housing authorities.

So it's at the core of a lot of the missions of housing authorities.

If you look around the country, a lot of housing authorities still have in their mission statement the terms to provide decent, safe, and sanitary housing.

Redevelopment projects were the next layer of authorized activity.

And on this slide, you'll see a definition of redevelopment project.

Of course, CRHA has been involved in a lot of redevelopment and rehabilitation projects.

So your board is very familiar with the process for those.

Conservation projects, think of it basically as redevelopment light, meaning it's

The action of trying to intervene in the neighborhood or community before it deteriorates to the point where it becomes blighted.

Conservation is something that housing authorities are allowed to do.

There is just very little funding for it.

If this presentation was 25 years ago, I would have told you we do a lot of conservation work.

Not sure what happened.

Okay.

MNN domains.

So on the next few slides, you'll see some of the information about MNN domain.

And it's really mostly for historical purposes to give you an idea of what

housing authorities used to be able to do.

So eminent domain obviously is the acquisition of properties by condemnation.

And the purpose when eminent domain was first enacted was the elimination of slums and blight when it comes to the housing authorities powers to use eminent domain.

And it was used quite a bit around the Commonwealth of Virginia, mostly for large projects that required the acquisition of several parcels of land from different landowners.

Many of you will recall that in 2005, there was a decision called Kelo versus City of New London.

It arose out of a situation in Connecticut that would not have been something allowed in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

But in that case, it was decided that private redevelopment of an area was a permissible public use of the power of eminent domain.

and that created an outcry across the country and people really did not react well to the notion of their privately owned property being potentially taken by a municipality for the purpose of simply conveying it to a private developer for private use.

And so there was a huge reaction to this decision across the country.

and it led to statutory amendments in Virginia in 2007 stating that housing authorities can no longer acquire non-blighted properties pursuant to a redevelopment plan and they redefined blight and it's now very difficult to demonstrate that a property is blighted under the new definition.

In addition to that, in Virginia we had a constitutional amendment in 2012 which makes it even harder to use eminent domain for housing purposes because it states specifically that it is not an allowable public use, therefore not eligible for condemnation

if the primary purpose of the redevelopment activity is for private benefit or private enterprise, increasing tax revenue or creating economic development.

And you can only get past that if you can demonstrate that the property creates a public nuisance.

Again, a harder threshold to meet.

Which means that basically as of today I can tell you there is no eminent domain happening.

for housing authorities.

And really the only cases of condemnations that we see nowadays are condemnation cases initiated by power companies or VDOT when they're building a road or installing new utilities.

Then those cases can lead to successful acquisition using eminent domain, but housing authorities are no longer using eminent domain.

And if they tried, I don't think

who would be successful if they were challenged in court.

I will pause for a second to see if there are any questions at this point.

So on this slide, you see the list of unique powers that housing authorities have in Virginia, which cities do not have.

And I list them on this slide because it's interesting to think of some of these powers.

And it's not necessarily intuitive to think that, for example, a city does not have the power to make loans or grants.

to private owners

or to a private entity.

They can make loans or grants to other agencies and to housing authorities obviously, but it's difficult for cities to exercise the powers that are listed here.

So it's interesting for you to keep in mind as you move forward with some of the activities that you have.

For example,

Housing authorities have the right to issue private activity bonds to assist private developers of housing which is something that a lot of housing authorities do and it's really beneficial because it complements your mission and you don't have to spend any money.

You're just a conduit issuer of bonds and it can really be beneficial to the community.

The last bullet says that you can exercise powers in other municipalities.

I don't think it has happened, at least not recently, for Charlottesville, but it does happen on occasion where a municipality does not have a housing authority.

For example, Henrico County doesn't have a housing authority and sometimes they call upon other housing authorities to assist them with some of their projects.

and they've done it several times using the Suffolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

So it's interesting how it can lead to some cooperation between municipalities to accomplish housing projects.

Your relationship to city council, of course, as you know, you're appointed by city council.

City council also has the right to approve or not your housing redevelopment and conservation plans

after they've been adopted by your board.

And your city council has the power to provide funding to you, which does occur on occasion, but that's really not a fixed process.

It occurs on a year by year basis as made available in the city's budget.

So it is not an automatic funding.

It is discretionary on the part of city council.

Your relationship to HUD is the most important relationship that the Housing Authority has.

It is the entity that provides most of your funding, the vast majority of it, because HUD funds both public housing, or Section 9, and vouchers, or Section 8.

And because they provide funding for those programs, they have some strings attached with regard to how the funds are to be used,

and they include reporting obligations for the public housing program.

Those reporting obligations come through the form of FAS, which is a system for HUD to evaluate how you're doing in spending funds in the public housing program.

And for the housing choice voucher program, that evaluation is done through CMAP.

Both of these scoring mechanisms, so to speak,

are really important because this is the vehicle that HUD uses to determine whether or not you're fulfilling your obligations with regard to the use of these funds and it includes both an audit of files as well as physical inspections of your units.

And because those audits and scoring processes are very involved, there are audits going on basically at all times.

So it's likely that there's a HUD audit going on right now.

It's not a bad thing.

It's just a part of the process.

If you score well,

then your agency can be a high performer if you don't score well there are some penalties associated with that all the way down to being a troubled agency and potentially eventually being put in receivership by HUD so there are some pretty dire consequences

if you do not score well in FAS and CMAP.

If you do score well, it does open up some funding opportunities.

For example, high performers have access to certain HUD grants that are not made available to other housing authorities.

So it's a really important process and it takes a lot of time for your staff to make sure that basically the files are in order,

both from a financial standpoint and from the standpoint of making sure the tenants that you place in the public housing program and in the housing choice voucher program are meeting all of the requirements for eligibility.

So it's a pretty onerous process to go through to make sure you're doing everything you're supposed to do basically.

Oh my goodness it keeps doing that.

I'm sorry it keeps making me refresh my session and I don't understand why.

Let me see if I can reopen it.

My apologies, I'm trying to go back and refresh so I can share my screen again.

OK, so the next slide is your role as a commissioner.

So you have seven voting members.

The law requires that you have at least one resident of assisted housing on your board, but your bylaws require two.

But by statute, you have to have one at least.

All of you are fiduciaries of public funds, because as I mentioned on the prior slide,

You receive funding from HUD, which is federal funding.

And therefore, the Board of Commissioners, as the governing board of the Housing Authority, serves as a fiduciary of those federal funds.

You operate within the bylaws, which govern the officers, the elections, of course, how your meetings are conducted, how often, and the quorums for your meeting.

You have some flexibility with regard to your bylaws and you can amend them.

As long as you meet the minimum requirements that are imposed by statute, you can go above that and do more than is absolutely required.

What you cannot do is do less, obviously.

Each of you as a Commissioner is indemnified by the Housing Authority for Reasonable Business Acts.

and we'll get back to that later in the presentation.

But what this means is that as long as you act within the scope of your role as a commissioner, CRHA will indemnify you in the event you are sued or otherwise found liable for decisions you made in your capacity as a commissioner.

But again, this assumes that you acted within the scope of your duties and not beyond that.

and your liability is limited to the amount of annual compensation that you receive for serving on the board.

So receipt of a stipend is basically the only compensation that you're allowed to receive in the Commonwealth of Virginia for your services and that stipend amount would be the maximum amount of your liability.

So we're gonna talk about the Freedom of Information Act next and that's

Most likely the most important statute that you come in contact with because you come in contact with it every single time you discuss housing authority matters, whether it's at your regular board meetings or otherwise.

And we're going to talk about both facets of FOIA.

The first facet of FOIA is the notion of public meetings.

What's a public meeting and what isn't?

and the next part is public records.

So we're going to start with public meetings.

Because CRHA is a public housing agency and a governmental entity, all items involving the discussion of the business of CRHA must be decided in public at a duly noticed public meeting, which means that members of the public have to be able to come to the meeting

make comments at a designated time on your agenda and hear the conversation and discussions of the commissioners as well as the votes.

Keep in mind that a meeting is a public meeting if we have at least three commissioners discussing CRHA business.

So that is probably the most important part of the public meeting aspect of FOIA and here's why.

It doesn't matter if you're not technically present at a duly called meeting of the board, if you have three commissioners together discussing any CRHA business, whether it's at a cocktail party, a wedding, at someone's house, or

through an email that involves three commissioners or through a text message, that's a public meeting.

And it's illegal unless you provided public notice and an opportunity for the public to attend, which most likely you didn't if you just happened to find yourselves at a cocktail party together.

So my recommendation is if you find yourself at a social event and you see that there are three commissioners in the room,

It's fine as long as you do not discuss CRHA business.

If you start discussing CRHA business, then that's an illegal meeting.

Generally, the code does not allow for meetings to be conducted by phone or electronically, but there are exceptions.

Two of them are the most important and have applied to you.

One is emergency situations and the other is a remote participation policy.

So emergency, obviously we all went through COVID.

Any type of state of emergency declared by the governor creates a situation where you are allowed to have meetings electronically.

And if you do, and you will remember during the COVID timeframe, when you meet electronically,

You have to include in your minutes an explanation of why you're meeting electronically.

You have to give notice of the meeting in advance, and you have to make arrangements for people to participate via Zoom, phone calls, or otherwise.

And similarly to a meeting in person, you have to give people the opportunity to make public comments.

The second exception to meetings being required to occur in person is a remote attendance policy.

and you have one for your agency.

So the code allows two different types of remote attendance policies and they're both listed on this slide.

The important piece being that you have to have adopted a policy before you try to start meeting electronically.

Again, this is in the absence of a state of emergency.

So you have that policy in place for the Charlottesville Housing Authority

which means you have the right to conduct some of your meetings electronically.

Closed meetings, so you went in closed session earlier in this meeting so you understand how this works.

There is a strict process to go into closed session and to come out of closed session, which is why Chair O'Rourke read the resolutions which referenced the statute.

The important thing to note here is that you can't just choose to go into closed session for any reason.

It has to be for the discussion of one of the topics that FOIA specifically allows you to go into closed session for.

And so on this slide, you'll see that

They're listed here most of the time for housing authorities.

It will be personnel matters, real estate acquisition or disposition, and legal matters.

Those would be the three most frequent topics that are used by housing authorities to convene a closed session.

As all of you know, you cannot vote in closed session.

That should go without saying since all votes have to be taken publicly.

So we've talked about public meetings.

Now we're going to talk about public records.

But I'd like to pause and see if there are any questions before we move into the second aspect of FOIA.

OK.

All right, so public records.

So we just talked about public meetings, which is one aspect of FOIA.

What you need to keep in mind is that even if you're not in a public meeting, you may very well be creating a public record.

So for example, if one commissioner sends an email to another commissioner and it's just two commissioners, not three on that email, we don't have an illegal public meeting because it's two commissioners, not three, but we have a public record

Meaning that email in and of itself is not illegal, but it is a record that is open to inspection by the public at any time.

So if we receive a FOIA request, we would have to provide a copy of that email.

FOIA requests do not have to specify the reason for the request.

It's irrelevant.

Anyone can send the Housing Authority

A request to see public records and if you do receive that request by law you have five business days to respond.

Now the response doesn't necessarily mean you provide all the records that have been asked for.

What the response can do is ask for more time to respond.

and by law you have the right to request and receive automatically an extension for seven additional business days.

But you do have to make the request for the extension within the initial five business days.

Many records are exempt from disclosure including personnel information and obviously attorney-client privilege.

What is important to note here is that if a record includes some information that's exempt from disclosure, then the housing authority has the obligation to redact the record and provide the portions of the record that are not exempt from disclosure.

As I mentioned, any correspondence that has to do with CRHA business is not exempt from disclosure.

Again, unless it falls within one of the exemption categories, for example, if I as a legal counsel to CRHA send one of you or the entire board an email regarding legal matters,

then that correspondence would not be subject to FOIA because it's attorney-client privilege but generally speaking keep in mind that all communications are public records and that's true regardless of whether it's your private email account that is being used or even a text message on your private cell phone as long as it pertains to housing authority business it becomes a public record

That includes also all signed contracts and employment contracts and it can be burdensome to respond to FOIA requests and by law you have the right to charge the person requesting the records for the actual costs of searching for the records and making copies.

And sometimes you don't make copies, you just send them electronically which is usually more cost effective.

but you can still charge for the amount of time that CRHA staff spends on producing the records.

Any questions on FOIA before we move on to conflicts of interest?

Okay.

So moving on to conflicts of interest, most of you know about this intuitively

So this is just a refresher for you to be aware, to the extent you don't think about it often, but just to be aware of the rules regarding conflicts of interest.

It's important to keep those in mind because sometimes, even though Charlottesville is a pretty large community, it's still, at the end of the day, a small world and there are some connections between people and companies

or family relationships that create conflicts of interest that you may not have contemplated.

And it's often a situation that's benign.

It's not necessarily nefarious.

People think of conflicts of interest and they think someone is doing something absolutely wrong.

And certainly those cases exist, but by and large conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflicts of interest can occur

inadvertently and that's why it's important to be aware of the rules so that you can sort of keep in mind the fact that as a commissioner you're not supposed to have a contract or a financial relationship with the housing authority on whose board you sit and that extends to your family basically.

So this is what this slide talks about and it talks about what's considered a personal interest in a transaction.

So this is the definition in the statute that governs conflicts of interest for local government agencies.

And you'll see that it has to do with basically realizing some kind of direct or indirect benefit as a result of your position on the board and a transaction that the agency is entering into.

It is very fact-specific, meaning that although the statute recites the rules, those rules are really only at play, so to speak, if we look at the details of each individual situation, because personal interests in transactions are rarely straightforward, meaning it's rarely a situation

where a commissioner himself or herself tries to enter into a direct contract with the housing authority.

Most often it will be a commissioner's family member, maybe himself or herself, a shareholder in a corporation that is a subcontractor

of someone building housing, for example, for the housing authority.

So it can be several steps removed, which is why it's important to keep in mind that it all depends on the specific facts of the situation.

The statute includes a list of conduct that is absolutely prohibited no matter what.

and there are on the next couple slides again most of them are very intuitive obviously never accept money in exchange for your vote that should go without saying

Don't use to your own economic benefit confidential information that you're acquiring because you're on the Board of Commissioners for example.

Don't accept any gifts or favors if you know that the gift or favor is meant to influence your decision as a member of the Board of Commissioners of CRHA.

Do not receive any kind of compensation and that can include

a dinner for example if someone tries to buy you dinner because they know that you're on the board of CRHA and they're hoping that if they buy you dinner then you will vote favorably when they're looking to have a contract with the housing authority again it's obvious but you'd be surprised the number of times these things come up so again on the list of prohibited conduct

Don't accept a business opportunity when you know that you're being offered that opportunity to influence you in your role as a commissioner.

Gifts from sources that are trying to raise the appearance of you using your position in office for some kind of private gain.

And also using your position to retaliate or threaten

someone or a company again that is something that's prohibited and it's fairly intuitive in addition in Virginia specifically you're not allowed to solicit accept or receive a gift with a value of $100 or more in any given year from anyone

If you know or you have a reason to know that the person making the gift to you is trying to be a party to a contract with CRHA.

So bottom line, be careful who buys you dinner.

Now in addition to the state statutes,

You also have a provision in the annual contributions contract, which is the contract the housing authority enters into with HUD in order to receive funding.

And in section 19 of that contract, it states that you cannot, as a housing authority, you cannot enter into a contract with any present or former commissioner

during their tenure and importantly and that's the difference with the statute it extends to one year after your term meaning you can't resign from being a commissioner on the board of CRHA and then a month later enter into a contract with CRHA you have to wait one year and that's true for yourself and for your immediate family so again I include this slide because that's a difference

with the state statute, which really only cares about what you do during your term of office.

HUD cares about what you do during your term of office and for one year after that.

Any questions on this?

Okay, so under HUD rules, there is a process to obtain a waiver or an exception from a conflict of interest

if it arises, and it's a process that's evaluated on a case by case basis.

So basically what that means is that if you know that you have a situation where there is a conflict of interest, but the housing authority as a whole through its board is of the opinion that the conflict of interest should be waived so that the housing authority can continue with the transaction despite the conflict of interest,

Then you can submit a request to HUD for HUD to give you a waiver but that is only given on a case-by-case basis and it has to be accompanied by an opinion of council stating that if the exception is granted there will be no violation of state law or local law and it's pretty rare to be honest to receive those waivers

It does occur from time to time, but it's pretty rare and you have to basically submit your request and your case file with the justification of why you think that waiver should be granted.

And it goes to your HUD field office.

Other statutes, just to mention that they exist,

The first one is the Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act.

That's important just for you to be aware because that means the data that the housing authority collects obviously includes personal information.

We're mostly talking about resident information like names, addresses, social security numbers, income, sometimes disability status, age,

Information about the children or the composition of the household, that information is protected and this statute listed here governs how the data is to be collected, how long it is saved, who can access it, who can review it, who can copy it, how long you keep it, and how you have to dispose of it.

and this is important because it's one of the reasons why commissioners are not supposed to get copies of tenant files ever because there are strict rules as to how those files are to be handled basically.

Public Procurement Acts, everyone on this board is aware of how this works but the reason I'm listing it here is that CRHA is subject to both state

and Federal Public Procurement Laws which govern how you enter into contracts and you have to abide by both sets of rules which means that in the event one of the two is stricter than the other then the stricter rule applies.

So it's a process obviously and it's very regulated but this is a reminder that this applies to any contract that the Housing Authority enters into.

So now we're going to talk about some of the details of your role as a commissioner and really what's important to remember here if you remember one thing about this presentation is that as a commissioner you have three roles and they're on this slide and those are the only roles they're extremely important roles but this is it number one

You set the broad CRHA policy.

The Board of Commissioners is a policy board, not a working board in terms of handling the day-to-day operations of the agency.

So keep in mind, you set the policy.

You do not administer the day-to-day operations of the agency.

Number two, you administer the finances and the budget.

You are fiduciaries of public funds, which is why

You approve the budget and you should review the budget and the line items in the budget because you are fiduciaries of public funds.

So any funds that come to you from HUD or from the city on occasion, you have to make sure that they're being spent properly.

Last but not least, the board hires and evaluates the executive director.

Keep in mind the executive director is the only employee that the board hires, evaluates, and can terminate.

No other employee.

That's extremely important.

You cannot get involved with personnel decisions beyond the executive director's position.

Any questions on this slide?

Okay.

The executive director is responsible for everything else.

And what that means is that the executive director, once you as the board have selected to hire an executive director, the executive director becomes responsible to implement all of the board approved policies.

If there's a violation of a board policy, then that's a personnel issue you need to deal with with the executive director.

not with staff obviously and if policies need to be amended then those policies need to come to you as a board to review and revise because the executive director has to implement whichever board policies have been approved and amended.

The Executive Director also makes all financial decisions after you've approved the budget.

So once you approve the budget, the Executive Director has to implement it as approved.

The Executive Director cannot unilaterally change line items, for example, in the budget that you've approved, unless you give him that discretion.

The Executive Director also makes all CRHA personnel decisions

He can inform you of those decisions, but the board itself is not the body that hires, evaluates, or fires other employees of the agency.

The executive director does that.

If the executive director has to create new staff positions that require funding, then the executive director would come to you if that funding is not already in the board approved budget.

But if it is in the board approved budget, then no additional approval is needed.

and then of course as you know the Executive Director is in charge of all day to day operations which means implementation of the board approved policies but also handling everything for all operations.

The Executive Director has the right to delegate some of those responsibilities

to staff that reports to the executive director, but at the end of the day obviously the buck stops with the executive director and he or she is responsible for what happens.

The next couple of slides have to do with best practices and those are listed because they are sort of real life examples of what will happen in the course of your term as a commissioner.

and what you should do when those situations arise.

So the first one is, what should I do as a commissioner if a resident approaches me and has an issue or concern?

For example, you receive a call from a resident at Crescent Halls, just as an example, and the resident says, well, I have an issue, I'm not happy with my unit, or I have a maintenance issue, and it's not being addressed.

Please refer the issue to the property manager or to the executive director.

That is the person the resident should contact.

And I understand the resident will tell you, I'm not getting any responses from staff.

Nobody's addressing my issue.

In that case, please don't try to resolve it yourself.

Present the issue to the executive director and let him or her handle the issue.

If he doesn't handle the issue, then you can have that discussion with the executive director, but please do not try to resolve the issue yourself.

Similarly, if an employee approaches you and complains about their employment situation or wants a raise or is not happy with their supervisor, please try not to intervene

You have to refer those issues to the executive director who will then involve HR or other people, perhaps legal counsel as well, depending on the circumstance.

But please do not try to take aside or handle a personnel matter.

There are policies in place for CRHA employees.

There are grievance policies as well because CRHA is a public entity.

Please do not try to handle

the issue yourself and also be very mindful of any comments that you may make to the employee because you may make a comment that will end up being used against the agency down the road potentially in mitigation and if you do keep in mind because you're not at that point within the scope of your role as a commissioner you're also at risk of personal liability so the bottom line is

Don't get involved.

You cannot prevent people from reaching out to you, but if they do, don't try to take a side, don't try to suggest the outcome or the resolution of the concern.

Instead, refer it to the executive director.

If you have a question or if you need additional information,

It depends on whether it occurs in a board meeting or separately.

If you're in a board meeting, feel free to ask the question during the board meeting as appropriate, depending on the agenda.

If not, outside of board meetings, please direct your questions to the executive director.

Try to not bypass, so to speak, the executive director to go to CRHA staff.

That's disruptive of the functioning of the agency if you try to overlook the role of the executive director.

And it's also inappropriate for commissioners to give work or homework, so to speak, to CRHA staff.

You cannot direct them to take certain actions.

You can only direct the executive director to take certain actions.

So try to keep that in mind when you have questions or if you require

additional information or report about something, please direct those questions to the executive director directly as opposed to staff.

If there is something that you think would be of interest to the rest of the board and you'd like to share it,

The best practice is really to give that information or document or article to the executive director and then he can include it in the board packet or otherwise make it available to all commissioners.

But basically try to not email each other about articles or items of interest because again, if you do that, you're creating a public record.

If there's discussion back and forth on an email,

You potentially have violated FOIA rules with regard to public meetings so try not to do that.

It seems sometimes that it's harmless and you're just sharing an article or you saw something in the newspaper and you feel it would be good to share it with everyone on the board because it has a housing component or something like that and so you don't mean any harm by it but the issue is that inadvertently

you may well start a violation of FOIA because you send the article then someone will reply to all and see how that would apply to one of your developments for example and here we go you have a discussion of CRHA business and it's in an email and it involves multiple commissioners and therefore it's an EGLE public meeting.

Sorry.

The next one is about EGLE questions.

Obviously if you have legal questions, please refer them to the Executive Director and then he can decide to get in touch with legal counsel.

You can contact me directly, but it's technically better if you go through the Executive Director first, unless your concern is about the Executive Director, in which case you can contact me directly, but otherwise if you have any kind of legal

issues that come up in the context of your role as a commissioner please go to your executive director and then he will take steps to address your question.

If you have concerns about a potential conflict of interest please discuss it with the executive director or with me

Don't bring it up in a public meeting and I say that because most of the time it's not really a conflict of interest and so it's best to first discuss the different components of the situation.

As I mentioned earlier, conflicts of interest are really fact specific so we have to look at the entire issue and determine whether or not there's a conflict and then if there is a potential conflict of interest, there are rules as to how we address it.

some of them require a disclosure of the conflict at a board meeting and some of them involve a disqualification meaning the commissioner involved in the conflict of interest would not be able to participate in the discussion or the vote with regard to the matter that is the subject of the conflict of interest but there are some steps we need to follow basically if there is a conflict of interest so if you think there is a potential situation like that

Please discuss it with John and then he can talk to me and we can work through it.

Again on this slide, a reminder that a communication among three commissioners or more, whether it's in person, by text, by phone, by email, is a public meeting.

If you're talking about CRHA business,

and as a result because it's a public meeting you have to give notice and you have to let the public access that conversation which means please don't do it basically because chances are obviously you didn't give notice that you were going to send an email to three commissioners and have a discussion about CRHA so it's going to be an illegal meeting.

Please don't reply all on emails related to CRHA business.

As a matter of fact, very often it's a bad idea to reply all, period.

But if it involves CRHA business and you reply all, again you're creating potentially a situation where we're going to have an illegal meeting.

Same thing if you find yourself at a wedding or a funeral and you have other commissioners who are in the room, just don't talk about CRHA matters and then everything is fine.

Now one of the examples that comes up unfortunately people will say well I was at a cocktail party and there were three commissioners there and we talked about CRHA business but we don't think we violated FOIA because the matter that we talked about would have been the type of matter we talk about in closed session therefore we didn't violate anything.

and hopefully you've gathered by now that that's not the correct answer.

It is a violation of FOIA and it is an illegal meeting regardless of the topic and here's why.

You can't have a closed session without first having a public meeting during which you take a vote to convene a closed meeting and then you're in closed session

and then at the end of the closed session you vote to certify the closed session.

So regardless of the topic of discussion, even if it's a legal matter or a personnel matter with regard to which it would be legal to go into closed session, don't do it unless you're first in a public meeting that has been properly advertised and at which the public has the opportunity to make comments

and attend.

Hopefully that makes sense.

If you have any questions, please ask.

Just generally speaking, avoid texting three commissioners on the same text or email about CRHA matters.

And if you find yourself at a social event, just don't talk about CRHA matters and then we won't violate FOIA, basically.

And that's it.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to take them now.

But I'm also happy to respond to your questions at a different date.

We don't have to answer all of them right now.

And you can always feel free to contact me at any time after this meeting.

I hope this makes sense.

Do you have any questions now or would you like to explore anything further in the presentation?

Yeah, thank you.

I know it's not the most thrilling topic in the world, but it is very important.

It was very clear to me.

I'll just follow up.

With you over email, I had a question about FOIA when email becomes a public meeting.

Sounds good.

And my email address is on the presentation, as well as my cell phone.

You can always feel free to reach out to me.

You're welcome.

Anything else that you had questions about?

I know John wanted this training for today because obviously you've had some changes in commissioners as people get appointed or their term on the board expires.

So we wanted to do this training.

I know in the past,

perhaps at a time when the configuration of the board was slightly different.

We had other trainings.

One of them was on low-income housing tax credits because obviously your agency is involved in several projects that involve the use of low-income housing tax credits.

So that's one potential topic.

If you would like additional trainings down the road or if you'd like simply copies of presentations, feel free to reach out.

I don't mind at all.

sharing them with you.

And I'm happy to conduct other trainings on other topics that may come to mind.

As John knows, I'm happy to do that.

If you're curious about additional affordable housing programs, taxes and bonds, for example, and things like that, feel free to go on my firm's website.

I have posted on there several trainings and explanations of financing structures

So if you'd like to dig a little bit deeper, so to speak, in the types of structure that we use for Sixth Street or South First Street or Crescent Halls, things like that, those projects specifically are not named in the presentations, but you will see how the financing structure work.

Thank you, Delphine.

I'm starting to look like none of the commissioners have any further questions.

If we could, our next agenda item is FAR public comments.

Would anybody like to come up and speak?

Hello, my name is Terri Tabri.

I'm a resident at South First Street and I just wanted to say, just to give an update, that CRHA has been making progress and trying to work on finding me a place in regards to my reasonable accommodations.

I'm actually going to go look at one.

Next week, I think on the 20th, so I'm very excited about that, and I appreciate, even though it's taken a while, I appreciate their help.

Also, I wanted to speak on the Youth Link program that I seen happening today at South First Street.

I got a flyer for it yesterday that it was going on on Thursdays, and then my neighbor,

Thank you for your comment.

Would anybody else like to speak?

and it looks like we have nobody online and we've asked the public.

We could close public comment and PHAR I believe has said no also.

All right.

Second.

Yes.

All right.

Yes.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye.

Have a good evening.