The Charlotte Housing Authority expected the final version of a report on the agency to be different from the preliminary report. But the writers of that preliminary report, which caused the Charlotte Housing Authority (CHA) a rash of bad publicity, have dug in their heels. The result is a final report that sticks to its original conclusions — minus a few factual changes — about the agency that oversees Charlotte’s public housing and Section 8 programs. Despite two meetings with authority staff since the preliminary report came out, Reznick Fedder & Silverman insist that although the authority has made progress in several areas, it must be more accountable if it expects to remain a viable organization and receive outside funding and resources, particularly from local government and private sources.
The writers of the report stuck to their guns in particular over management issues, refusing to remove a line that says that “often there is no disciplinary action taken when an employee fails to do his/her job” and that the level of accountability among departments “is extremely low.”
“There is a clear need for accountability across CHA,” the report reads. “Directors can and must be held responsible for controlling the amount of effort each employee puts forth to complete their daily, weekly and monthly tasks.”
CHA board member Kip Kiser agrees: “The accountability of our employees, that’s the biggest issue.”
Despite written protests of CHA head Harrison Shannon in the Charlotte Observer, according to the operations review, auditors found the level of customer service at the agency to be “low throughout the organization in spite of the great deal of ‘lip service’ it receives.”
Like most other board members, Dick Van Dyke, who chairs the CHA board, said he had little to say about the report until the board formally discussed its conclusions at the board meeting the group held Tuesday. (Creative Loafing’s deadline for this story was Monday.)
But carefully worded, italicized additions to the report spoke for themselves. Reznick authors left in their original assertions that the agency’s stockroom, the equivalent of an in-house hardware store, is open to maintenance staff throughout the course of the workday and that researchers saw staff walk into the stockroom in the middle of the day and take maintenance inventory from the shelves without checking it out. The story of an audit of a randomly selected employee also remained. An inventory report showed he had 418 items in his van, more than was physically possible for the automobile to hold.
But Reznick backed off on its report of $50,000 of inventory that goes unaccounted for each quarter, suggesting instead that the materials might have simply gone unaccounted for as used on work orders which employees are supposed fill out.
The report also concludes that a new bar-coding system currently being put in place will help the situation.
Also new to the final report was a well-crafted warning to the authority. Researchers’ conversations with the HUD office in Greensboro revealed that the agency, which receives federal funding from HUD, was essentially operating with little or no oversight to assure that it complies with public housing policies and procedures. Report authors dubbed that both good and bad news.
“If HUD should ever decide to audit CHA’s performance, there is the potential that there would be little, if any warning or guidance from HUD to correct deficiencies before the results of a HUD audit are published.”
Kiser worries about the same thing, although he believes the report’s authors missed much of the problem because until recently, when the authority hired a new chief financial officer, authority records were sloppily kept and unclear.
“We need financial accountability so people will know that we’ll do with the money they give us what we said we would do,” said Kiser.
Kiser said the authority is rapidly coming to a crossroads, which the report vaguely refers to when it mentions the battle on the board between the “bricks and mortar” contingent and those who want to essentially spend close to half of the building maintenance money from the federal government — about $5 million a year in capital grants to fix basic things like roofs and aging plumbing systems — on social programs and staffing, a situation which Kiser says leaves public buildings like those in Piedmont Courts in increasing disrepair.
“If we keep having budget deficits and keep financing the place on the backs of maintenance, we are going to have problems,” said Kiser. “That’s the real debate on the board. Do we want to spend the money for what it is for, or let the property decline until there’s no place for anyone to live and someone will have to bail us out?”
About three years ago, when board member Roy Matthews chaired the board, it set a goal to stop borrowing from the building maintenance grants and stop running a yearly deficit.
“They have always had an opinion that someone will ride in on a white horse and save us when there is no place left for these people to live,” Kiser said of many of the board members. “We are not the Department of Social Services. Our mission is to provide affordable housing.”
The problem, said Kiser, is that the situation produces an endless Catch-22. The agency is underfunded, said Kiser, and hasn’t had any real money from the city in years. To get that sort of funding from the city and the private sector, Kiser said the organization needs financial accountability.
But if the public housing properties aren’t maintained, Kiser said that even if the knight on the white horse (most likely the city and the federal government) comes to bail the organization out, new policies attached to federal reconstruction grants like HOPE VI mandate that mixed-income neighborhoods be built where low-income housing once stood — which means the authority would be forced to lose units it currently has. Some of them would be replaced with market-rate units, which federal policy makers have come to believe helps stabilize low-income neighborhoods and prevent them from turning into slums.
As recent Charlotte history shows, when public housing units disappear to make way for non-subsidized, market-rate units, people are displaced, generating outrage in some quarters of the community.
“It’s a tough choice,” said Kiser, “but it is one we have to make.” *
Rodgers Set Free
Rape plaintiff finds out over a week laterBy Tara Servatius
On November 13, Donnie Alexander Rodgers walked out of the county jail a free man. It was over a week before Elizabeth Connolly (not her real name), the subject of a CL cover story (“Unprotected,” November 14)learn that the man she says broke into her Elizabeth home and violently raped her two years ago was back on Charlotte’s streets.
Last week, around the time Connolly learned Rodgers was out, she opened an unpaid medical bill. The $525 in charges resulted from care she received after she was raped in December 1999. The bill, which she says she can’t pay, may not be covered now by Victim’s Assistance, a national group that pays medical expenses of rape victims. That’s because the jury found her attacker innocent last month despite the fact that DNA evidence (semen found inside the victim) clearly pointed to Rodgers as her attacker.
“When I open the unpaid medical bills that date as far back as February 2000, I feel desperate, because I have not yet found the inner strength to rebuild my life,” said Connolly. “When I think of the justice system that allowed the early release of a violent, habitual felon back into our community who then is free to stalk, kidnap, assault and rape me, I feel violated.”
Jurors in the case, many of whom told Creative Loafing they had second thoughts after their verdict in the trial, said they suspected Rodgers had committed the crime but voted him not guilty because they felt the prosecution didn’t prove its case. Connolly claimed that she woke in the early morning hours to find a man who she didn’t know in her room with a hand over her mouth. Rodgers claims he called Connolly that night and had met her once before at a bar, where she gave him her phone number. She invited him to come over that night, he said. Rodgers’ story would have put them both at the house before 2:45am, when her roommates arrived home. Connolly said she arrived home from work shortly before her roommates and was raped around 4am.
The prosecution didn’t actively dispute Rodgers’ story, although it could have. Connolly’s employer at The Lamplighter told CL she worked late that night. Acquaintances tracked down by CL remember seeing her at Thomas Street Tavern late enough that it would have been impossible for Connolly to have been home to receive Rodgers’ supposed call. Phone records also could have been used to dispute Rodgers’ claim, but weren’t.
The fact that Rodgers left no fingerprints in the house and confusion over whether Connelly was sodomized — she wasn’t, but several jurors who misunderstood the evidence believed she was and held this against her, calling her “out there” — led to the not-guilty verdict.
Rodgers remained in jail for over a week after his October rape trial, awaiting a hearing before a judge on separate charges of public masturbation and communicating threats to an officer. The charges resulted from a call to police by a woman in the nearby Dilworth neighborhood within the hours after the rape. The woman testified at the rape trial that Rodgers masturbated in front of her while she was walking outside her home. Police caught Rodgers using the license tag number the woman had recorded, but at the rape trial, Rodgers said he was not in the Dilworth area that morning. He said he loaned his car to his brother, who must have been the one driving in the area.
Ironically, at his October 23 hearing before a judge on the public masturbation charge, Rodgers pled guilty to the charge, and to another for communicating threats to an officer. Criminal Attorney Bill Powers said Rodgers likely can’t be convicted for perjury in the rape case despite his testimony that he couldn’t have been the one the Dilworth woman saw masturbating because he wasn’t in the area that morning. Powers said it is common practice for defendants to choose to plead guilty to other related charges because the guilty plea will lead to a lighter sentence if they are convicted. But the justice system doesn’t necessarily recognize a guilty plea as an official admission of guilt.
Connolly isn’t the only one who now fears for her safety. The female Dilworth neighbors of the woman who testified that she saw Rodgers masturbating on the day of the rape say they fear for their safety, and a group is planning to circulate copies of a Creative Loafing issue containing Rodgers’ picture around their neighborhood. Sources also say that someone widely circulated copies of the issue in mailboxes along Shamrock Drive, where Rodgers’ family lives and where he lived before he was arrested and charged with rape.
The Dilworth resident who testified in the case says she fears for her safety, and plans to move. She said Rodgers’ record before the rape charge indicates that he is capable of violence, and she fears that he may have made repeat trips to the neighborhood before he was caught, and may return.
Rodgers has a 20-year history of convictions for breaking and entering, burglary, assault on a female and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill in a case in which he gutted a bouncer, slashing the man so violently across the abdomen, the man’s intestines spilled from the wound.
“How do I feel now that the man that raped me is free to re-offend?” Connolly asks. “I feel like I’m the prisoner. A prisoner of panic and fear. My sisters are still weeping, and I am still searching for justice.” *
This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2001.
