Lavish spending reflects poorly on low-income housing agency

How easy it must be, after one gains access to the privileges of public office, to lose track of what’s reasonable. At least that could explain how Stan Harris, the board chairman of the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, could have been “a little shocked” that anyone would question credit card spending by agency officials that more than doubled in four years, fueled largely by travel and swank entertaining.

The mission of CMHA is to help poor families live with dignity in safe, affordable housing.

How does that possibly square with treating the CMHA board and top executives to a $3,145 holiday party at upscale steakhouse Smith & Wollensky and stocking the agency’s South Linden headquarters with $6,323 worth of exercise equipment?

We suspect if Harris asked very many people outside the bubble in which CMHA officials apparently work, he would understand quickly that those and many other extravagant expenditures aren’t what most people consider reasonable, especially for a government agency.

Consider the salary trajectory of CMHA president and CEO Charles D. Hillman, who has seen his pay jump by 45% in the past three years, to $298,944. And he may be in line for another big raise. Similarly, the salary of Tom Williamson, CMHA’S chief financial officer, was raised 46%, from $164,798 in 2016 to $240,198 this year.

Surprise over those salaries prompted reporters Mark Ferenchik and Rita Price to request records of agency credit card spending by Hillman and Williamson. What they found was a pattern similar to the executives’ salaries: big dollars and big increases.

In 2014, Hillman and Williamson spent a total of $120,472 on an agency credit card; by 2018, the total had jumped to $259,759. In all five of those years together, credit-card spending was more than $906,000.

That’s an awful lot of travel and “business development,” two of the largest spending categories.

We’re glad the elected officeholders who appoint the CMHA board members have responded to the Dispatch stories with a demand for change. Mayor Andrew J. Ginther said that he wants to see more “accountability and transparency” from agency officials. “I expect to make that clear to the board, and make changes to the board if necessary,” he said.

So far, however, Williamson has offered only a vague description of policy changes to be made “in the coming months.”