Housing board said to wield heavy hand
Ex-chiefs, staff cite pushiness, interference
The revolving door of leadership at Little Rock’s public-housing authority — five executive directors in the past three years— is a result of heavy-handed governance by the board of commissioners, according to interviews with former directors and current and former employees as well as a review of internal documents.
These accounts show a Metropolitan Housing Alliance board that inserts itself into the agency’s day-to-day operations, while current and former employees said that city and federal officials have failed to provide adequate oversight.
The last three directors — Marshall Nash, Anthony Snell and Nadine Jarmon — left the agency or were forced out after clashes with the board, creating volatility at the top of an agency entrusted with providing critical services to some of Little Rock’s most vulnerable residents.
Former executive director Rodney Forte resigned in 2018 after six years at the helm of the housing authority. Forte’s relationship with the board grew contentious toward the end of his tenure with the board pushing him to resign several months before he intended. Forte declined to comment for this article.
The director is responsible for managing and hiring agency staff members and is the only employee who answers directly to the board of commissioners. The board’s role is to provide policy guid
ance to the executive staff.
Snell was interim executive director for six months before the board officially chose him for the post in October 2019, and he said he knew it might be “challenging” to work with the five-person board “based on their personalities and demeanor and what they considered to be their authority over staff.”
Snell said he soon found that the board believed its authority was absolute. He and Nash both said the commissioners behaved as if every employee in the agency answered to them.
“I hate to use this term, but it’s kind of a slave-master relationship,” Snell said in an Aug. 26 interview.
The current board is comprised of Leta Anthony, Louis Jackson, H. Lee Lindsey, Branndii Peterson and Chairman Kenyon Lowe. Board members’ terms are five years. Lowe, on the board since 2012, and Anthony since 2014, are the longest-serving members; the other three are still in their first terms.
Arkansas law states that housing authority boards are self-appointing but subject to approval by the local governing body — in this case, Mayor Frank Scott Jr. and the Little Rock Board of Directors.
Scott has said repeatedly that the city has limited power over the housing authority board because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is its governing body, though Arkansas law gives local governments the power to remove housing authority commissioners “for inefficiency or neglect of duty or misconduct in office.”
Rachel Kleit, an Ohio State University professor of city and regional planning whose research focus is fair and affordable housing, said the Alliance’s board of commissioners is “incredibly hands-on” to the point that some of its decisions make the executive director obsolete. Excessive involvement might not be illegal but could pose ethical problems, she said, especially if the local governing body has not actively supervised the board of commissioners.
“It’s not unusual that you have an organization that’s been a little isolated for years and years, and they do business the way they do it, and there’s a need to do business differently and they don’t respond,” Kleit said in an interview.
The Metropolitan Housing Alliance oversees about 900 traditional public housing units, 200 affordable housing units and 160 market-rate units. It also administers more than 2,000 Section 8 vouchers. It is the largest public-housing authority in Arkansas and provides housing assistance to about 8,000 low-income people.
None of the five commissioners responded to emails requesting comment for this article over the past two weeks. Lowe also did not answer calls or text messages, and he has said in the past that he is the only person affiliated with the Metropolitan Housing Alliance who can speak for the agency.
In June 2020, Snell resigned after nine months as director and wrote in his resignation letter that the board had harmed and micromanaged the agency.
Later that month, a group of agency employees sent an anonymous letter to Scott’s office calling for the removal of all five commissioners. The employees said their anonymity was “due to a fear of future retaliation.”
The board chose Jarmon as interim executive director in July 2020 and hired her on a permanent basis in April. She filed a 161-page complaint in June with Scott’s office and and the HUD Little Rock field office, alleging the same harmful overreach that Snell did while also echoing the anonymous letter’s call for the board’s removal.
In addition to claims of overreach and intimidation, Jarmon’s memo alleged that the housing authority board repeatedly engaged in unnecessary spending, sidestepped federal approvals and had conflicts of interest with parties involved in transactions with the agency. She included a collection of emails, bank statements, board minutes, board resolutions and other documents as evidence to back up her claims.
She was suspended without pay by the board shortly after sending the memo, and the board voted to fire Jarmon on Aug. 25.
Board members declined to publicly state a reason for her ouster, and as of last week, Jarmon said she still had not been sent a termination letter.
She plans to file a federal lawsuit in response, alleging retaliation for her complaint.
Financial Director Andy Delaney was named interim director in Jarmon’s absence.
BOARD, STAFF INTERACTIONS
Current and former housing authority employees said that board members at times would involve themselves with granular functions of the agency that they sometimes didn’t understand.
The board’s interactions with tenants were aired at a meeting Lowe held last year with the agency’s entire staff, shortly after Snell’s resignation and the anonymous letter to Scott’s office. A recording of the meeting was obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Several employees at the meeting said they were concerned about the board micromanaging the agency.
“I think we all have gotten calls from tenants where you spoke to them and gave them information that’s not accurate,” one employee told Lowe. “You’re a very intelligent, educated man, but you don’t do this every day, and sometimes when you [interpret] the regulations, it’s not really how it works, and you give incorrect information to the tenants and they come back to us. We have to go through a series of explaining to the tenants, ‘No, it doesn’t work that way.’”
Some tenants had said they believed Lowe was the new executive director after Snell’s departure, and an employee asked Lowe during the meeting if he had asked the federal housing department if he could have this position. Lowe said this issue was “just a private discussion.”
He also said at the meeting that the board closely monitors employees’ phone records for “accountability” reasons.
He later said he was concerned that the housing authority would be taken into receivership, in which HUD takes over the board’s duties.
A HUD spokesperson said Aug. 27 that receivership is a disciplinary option the department has, but it is a last resort, and “we do not want to imply at all” that the department is pursuing it now in light of Jarmon’s complaint.
CLASHES AND ACCUSATIONS
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette obtained months of emails between Jarmon and the board of commissioners through an Arkansas Freedom of Information Act request.
Several email exchanges corroborate portions of Jarmon’s memo about board demands that the executive staff could not meet because of policy or legal restraints.
In February, Jarmon told the board that the agency could not publicly announce new employees before terminating the those currently in the positions, and she said she had checked with board attorney Khayyam Eddings to be sure.
Anthony admonished Jarmon for this, saying Eddings was the attorney for the board and not the entire agency.
“These actions repeatedly disregards [sic] the requests of the board,” Anthony wrote on Feb. 4. “Information has been requested and only comes in bits and pieces only to be retracted and given more confusion. … Please keep in mind the role of the Board and the documentation of our Board request and the follow [through] from your office.”
In April, Anthony again accused Jarmon of not communicating with the board. Jarmon had said she could not fulfill the board’s request to fund a building project without first seeking approval from the federal housing department.
“The Board gave you instructions to secure the funds for the project,” Anthony wrote on April 22. “You have not provided any update to secure funds for the project or any movement on the project as directed by this Board. If there has been effort on your part pertaining to this matter, please provide that information to the members of the Board. If the [groundbreaking] date is not met, we have a problem with staff keeping us in the loop and doing due diligence with follow up to the Board. If staff follows up with the Board in a timely manner, the Board will have no need to request information that they should have already received.”
Nash, who has sued the board, told the Democrat-Gazette that the board’s messages to him had the same tone during his five months as interim executive director, from November 2018 to April 2019.
He said he stayed in the position longer than he expected, and he never sought the official post and wanted only to “bridge the gap” between executive directors after Forte resigned. The commissioners seemed to be “dragging their feet” in the hiring process, he said.
He agreed with Snell and Jarmon’s assessment of the board’s involvement.
“These people would not allow Rodney Forte, Anthony Snell or Nadine Jarmon to do their jobs,” Nash said. “There’s no way all these people are wrong. They all had the same reason for escalating situations and the same reason they ultimately left.”
LOCAL AND FEDERAL AUTHORITY
The Office of Public Housing in HUD’s Little Rock office “provides direct oversight to public housing authorities” to ensure they follow federal rules and regulations, a department spokesperson said. The department did not elaborate when asked about the structure of this oversight.
Jarmon’s complaint is being investigated by the the Housing and Urban Development Departmental Enforcement Center, the spokesperson said.
Scott’s office has said the city does not have the authority to investigate an agency that is governed by a federal department. However, state law does give local governments the authority to remove housing authority commissioners.
“A commissioner of a city or county housing authority may be removed from office for inefficiency or neglect of duty or misconduct in office only by the vote of the majority of the city council or county quorum court,” the law states.
In response to questions, Scott’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Jackson, said that the city was in a holding pattern.
“HUD is in the midst of its investigation, and we are awaiting the conclusion to determine any appropriate next steps,” Jackson said.
After receiving the anonymous letter from Metropolitan Housing Alliance employees last year, Scott said that he would initiate the process to dissolve the board of commissioners, citing “a number of concerns,” but it never happened.
The Little Rock HUD office also expressed “serious concerns” about the board last year.
Conflict continued this year with Jarmon’s lengthy complaint.
Lowe initially said Jarmon’s memo had no teeth because she did not send it to HUD’s Office of Inspector General, but Kleit said Jarmon was “perfectly within her rights” to reach out to two entities that have power over the Metropolitan Housing Alliance.
At the end of June, commissioners contracted with an attorney to investigate Jarmon’s claims, but HUD soon ordered the contract terminated because it wasn’t properly procured.
Housing authority employees said morale has been very low, especially since Jarmon was fired.
Snell said he believes the board members have good intentions at the end of the day, but “they’re in completely over their heads.”
“Their view of what a board should be is not aligned with the professional standards for an organization such as that,” Snell said. “That in and of itself creates the angst and the anxiety and the turnover in leadership, because those individuals do not have the competency to run the organization the way it was intended to run.”