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Development Office bullshits City Council

August 26, 2022

 

In "Feds chastise city oversight of Community Development dollars", a June 20 story in the City Pulse, reporter Todd Heywood talks about a November 12, 2021 letter from HUD to Lansing's Development Office. Heywood wrote that the "letter found four violations of federal grant oversight related to the use of the federal dollars [for] low income housing repair assistance. All four findings required the city to rectify the issues within no more than 30 days." Heywood got this comment from Scott Bean, communications director for the mayor's office:

 

 

As a grant administrator, the City of Lansing regularly receives communication on many programs. After a review, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development found some areas of general process improvement in the administration of this program. The City accepted these findings and moved to successfully implement those changes at that time with no further input from HUD.

  

 

Well, it's not exactly true that the City moved to implement the changes with no further input from HUD. There was a series of six letters and emails between the Development Office and HUD with HUD finally accepting closure of the last two findings in a March 16, 2022 letter. I obtained those communications in response to a June 13 FOIA request in which I asked for the Development Office's response to that November 12, 2021 letter from HUD. I didn't get them until August 22:

  1. An undated letter from Development Director Barb Kimmel to Portia McGoy of HUD which she describes as an interim response to Finding #2 "Failure to monitory rental projects" in the 11/12/2021 HUD letter. She says that of 165 rental units, 135 have been monitored in the last year. She attaches a schedule for monitoring the remaining unmonitored units.

  2. A 12/15/2021 letter from Brian McGrain, Director of Economic Development & Planning to Keith Hernandez in which he responds to Finding #1, Rehabilitation written policies and procedures; Finding #2, Failure to monitor rental projects; Finding #3, Failure to follow dispute resolution procedures; and Finding #4, Bids not solicited from an adequate number of qualified sources..

  3. A 1/18/2022 email from the Kimmel to McGoy responding to Finding #4 by providing policy and procedure for solicitation of contractors.

  4. A 1/31/2022 letter from Keith Hernandez to Brian McGrain in which he closes Findings #2 and 4, but for Finding 31, finds that some procedures are still lacking such as how to determine the acceptable quality of work before paying the contractor and how to track contractor misconduct and poor performance. And for Finding #3, procedures lacking for dispute resolution, including ensuring that all beneficiaries are informed of the process.

  5. A 2/28/2022 letter from Kimmel to Hernandez responding to Findings #1 and 3, noting that among other actions, an updated contractor complaint policy had been added to the Contractor Handbook.

  6. A 3/16/2022 letter from Keith Hernandez to Brian McGrain closing the last two findings.

Lansing City Council invited Brian McGrain, Director of Economic Planning & Development and Barb Kimmel, Development Director to an August 8 Committee of the Whole meeting to discuss the November 12, 2021 letter from HUD.

 

   

 

You can view the video of of the meeting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdcnqRmrQmQ. Or just click the photo above. The part about the Development Office starts at 11:38.

 

Councilwoman Wood was not pleased (25:10) that council had only recently heard about the 11/21/2022 HUD letter and heard of it from a constituent rather than the Development Office. But Brian McGrain characterized the whole matter as "routine" (13:30):

 

 

What you have before you is an example of routine communication we’ve received from HUD. HUD routinely makes monitoring visits to our office. You could probably characterize that as an audit. They routinely come and look at all of our programs. They do this on a periodic basis. In fact we are in the middle of closing out one of our grants as we speak. This happens, these things come to us, they come administratively. The letter you saw from November did point out some findings. I believe you’ve received the two close-out letters that were issued in February . . . We take these sorts of things seriously. When HUD suggests you could improve here, you could do a policy, Barb and her team are the ones who create those and in this case via some back and forth with our HUD field reps we did put those in place and I think you have the two letters demonstrating from February ’22 those findings are closed out.

  

 

At 29:19, Councilwoman Wood asks what happens when a project is complete, everyone including the homeowner signs off, and a few months later everything starts falling apart. Barb Kimmel responds:

 

 

We find a way to make the repairs. If the contractor refuses to act within the warranty period he’s no longer going to be working for our program, but we will find a way to make the repairs so that the homeowner gets what the homeowner paid for. . .We are doing everything we can to ensure the workmanship is high quality workmanship. The people in our office – the rehabilitation specialists – they do not accept work at your home or the public’s home that they would not accept at their own home.

  

 

What a joke. That is not at all what happened in the case of Tammie Arend. As I said in my July 15 story, when a leak flooded her home four months after the roof was replaced, the Development Office did not insist that the contractor clean up the mess. Nor did they offer to make the repairs themselves, or to find Tammie alternate housing. They refused to take her calls. They finally came and did an inspection over a year later, but the report was clearly designed to whitewash the whole matter. They lied to HUD, claiming the inspection revealed no water leaking and no evidence of anything wrong with the roof. Not only did they lie, they tried to discredit and denigrate Tammie so that HUD would ignore her complaints.

 

Send comments, questions, and tips to stevenrharry@gmail.com or call or text me at 517-730-2638. If you'd like to be notified by email when I post a new story, let me know.

 

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