Housing agency chief says time for board to go

Her memo to mayor alleges misconduct, mismanagement

The head of Little Rock’s public housing authority asked Mayor Frank Scott Jr. on Wednesday to dismiss the agency’s entire governing board, alleging “gross misconduct,” “inefficient governance,” financial mismanagement and excessive involvement in day-to-day agency operations.

Nadine Jarmon, executive director of the Metropolitan Housing Alliance, sent a 161-page memo to Scott and the Little Rock field office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The letter included a long list of accusations against the Alliance’s board of commissioners, including unnecessary spending, sidestepping necessary federal approvals, and conflicts of interests between commissioners and parties involved in transactions with the housing authority.

Jarmon submitted a collection of emails, bank statements, board minutes, board resolutions and other documents as evidence to back up her claims.

“My motives are not driven by anything other than my personal integrity and my belief in the mission of the Metropolitan Housing Alliance,” Jarmon wrote to the

mayor and the federal housing department.

“While I am aware of the tumultuous change of leadership at the agency over the past few years, my actions have nothing to do with my personal like or dislike of any individual board member, but rather my concern for the financial health and future of MHA.”

Board chairman Kenyon Lowe dismissed Jarmon’s concerns as “conjecture” in a Thursday interview.

The Little Rock public housing agency has seen a revolving door of executive leadership since 2018. Former executive director Rodney Forte resigned in November 2018 after six years in the position. Marshall Nash then served as interim executive director for five months. Anthony Snell was the next interim director for six months before he was officially hired into the position, and he left nine months later, in July.

Jarmon was hired as executive director in April after being tapped to lead the agency in an interim capacity in July.

The Metropolitan Housing Alliance is federally funded and locally controlled by a five-member board. The authority is the largest public housing agency in the state and provides rental assistance to people with lower incomes.

The board is self-appointing, subject to approval by the Little Rock board of directors and mayor.

A complaint against a member of any other self-appointing board that the city must approve, such as the Central Arkansas Water Authority or the Central Arkansas Library System, would generate a public hearing to present the reason for the complaint and offer the board member an opportunity to respond, Scott told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Thursday. The city Board of Directors would then vote to retain or remove the board member.

However, the federal housing department is the governing authority over the Metropolitan Housing Alliance, and the city does not have the authority to investigate the agency, the mayor said.

“What generally happens is we tend to follow [the federal department’s] lead,” Scott said. “If there’s a reason not to follow that lead or to take it in our own hands, then the process is the public hearing process.”

A Housing and Urban Development regional spokesperson said the department is examining the complaint and supporting documents, and will try to substantiate all the claims before initiating an investigation, which could include the inspector general’s office.

If Jarmon’s complaint were to eventually make its way before the city board, it would result in five separate public hearings and votes, one for each commissioner.

Scott said the city has never before received a request to remove an entire board.

Jarmon is not the first executive director, or even housing authority staff member, to raise concerns about the board.

A group of anonymous Metropolitan Housing Alliance employees sent a letter to the mayor’s office a year ago today with the same request to remove the board of commissioners. The employees said their anonymity was “due to a fear of future retaliation.”

“The board has shown great incompetence in its failure to understand the housing programs it oversees while adamantly injecting themselves in the day-to-day activities, and purposefully through its inability to hire and retain an executive director,” the letter stated.

That letter was not sent to federal housing authorities, and Scott said it lacked supporting documentation, making it difficult to investigate further.

Scott after receiving the anonymous letter last year said thathe would initiate the process of dissolving the Metropolitan Housing Alliance board of commissioners, citing “a number of concerns.”

The Little Rock Housing and Urban Development field office also expressed “serious concerns” about the board last year.

Still, the board remains in place.

Jarmon said Thursday that the board’s behavior concerned her as soon as she became interim executive director in July, but she did not feel comfortable stepping forward with her concerns until she became the official executive director two months ago.

“The people in the past just quit, and I could have done that too, but I wanted to see something done so anybody, not just me, could do their job without interference at this level from the board,” Jarmon said.

Snell’s resignation letter, included in Jarmon’s memo, cited a hostile work environment as one of his reasons for leaving the executive director’s post last year.

“A number of the [board’s] actions have been fundamentally detrimental to the agency and have systematically usurped my responsibilities as the Executive Director, constructively discharging me as the day-to-day leader of the agency, leaving me with no option but to offer my resignation,” Snell said in the June 2020 letter addressed to Lowe, the board chairman.

Lowe told the Democrat-Gazette that Nash and Forte, as well as Snell and Jarmon, have made the same allegations of board overreach, and “it didn’t hold water.”

“The board doesn’t do anything with day-to-day [operations],” Lowe said. “The board monitors, the board has oversight, and the board disciplines its only employee, which is the executive director.”

He said Jarmon’s complaints are “noise” “conjecture” and “just hearsay” because the city of Little Rock and the federal housing department’s field office do not have the direct authority to investigate the Metropolitan Housing Alliance. This authority lies with the housing department’s inspector general, Lowe said.

SPECIFIC ALLEGATIONS

Jarmon said the commissioners awarded or steered several contracts to entities with which individual commissioners had relationships.

Commissioner Leta Anthony was the board’s chairperson in June 2019 when it voted to transfer ownership of a plot of land called “Vernon Place” from the housing authority to its nonprofit arm, the Central Arkansas Housing Corp. A month earlier, Friendship Charter School issued a letter of intent to purchase Vernon Place.

Anthony voted in favor of the transfer despite being a board member and consultant for the charter school, and Jarmon said Anthony should have recused herself to avoid a conflict of interest.

Lowe said the federal housing department leaves it up to individual housing authorities to determine whether a board member has a conflict of interest if the board member has disclosed a relationship to an entity involved in a board resolution.

“The board did not see a conflict of interest because there was no monetary gain [for Anthony],” Lowe said.

The purpose of the Central Arkansas Housing Corp. is “to facilitate the development, financing and construction of multi-family and single-family residential housing in the city of Little Rock and the Central Arkansas area,” according to the housing authority’s website.

Transactions between the two entities are allowed only with approval from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Jarmon said. She said in a May email to housing authority procurement manager Jada Johnson that Lowe told her he wanted to transfer two properties, including Vernon Place, from the agency to the nonprofit as quickly as possible.

“I told him we have procured the firm to do the appraisal, and his response to me was that one has nothing to do with the other and he wanted these two properties ‘quick deeded’ to CAHC today if possible,” Jarmon wrote in an email.

Lowe told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he could not have made such a request about Vernon Place when the Central Arkansas Housing Corp. had already owned it for almost two years. He also said the federal housing department has to approve transactions related only to the programs it administers, and the Central Arkansas Housing Corp. is not a part of those programs.

Lowe also directed the housing authority staff in 2020 to purchase new laptop computers for the board at more than $4,000 a piece. Jarmon cited this as an example of unnecessary spending because the staff had recently bought commissioners laptops for half as much money, and the more expensive ones would serve no greater purpose, she said in her complaint.

The more expensive laptops were necessary because the cheaper ones did not work well with the housing authority’s information technology structure, Lowe said.

Additionally, the anonymous 2020 letter said the board regularly accused the staff “of not doing their jobs by not providing follow-up information.”

In a chain of emails to Jarmon in April, Anthony asked repeatedly for updates on a groundbreaking for a development project, saying Jarmon and her staff did not adequately follow up with the board on the plans for the event. Jarmon responded that Anthony’s target date was unrealistic.

“I will not yield to pressure to comply with or conform to unreliable and unrealistic timelines that I was not involved with establishing,” Jarmon wrote.

Anthony replied that there was no such pressure.

“The board is not in the habit of passing motions and resolutions [only] to have them ignored by staff,” Anthony wrote. “All of what has been requested of you is well documented.”

A Housing and Urban Development regional spokesperson said the department is examining the complaint and supporting documents, and will try to substantiate all the claims before initiating an investigation, which could include the inspector general’s office.

MOVING FORWARD

If none of the current commissioners are removed, working with them in the future will undoubtedly be “uncomfortable” unless they change their behavior, Jarmon said, but she does not plan to resign from her position.

“I’m willing to stay no matter what,” she said. “I’ve had difficult boards before, but not to this level. If [the complaint] doesn’t work out in my favor, and I’m still there and they’re still there, we’re going to have to learn to get along.”

Lowe declined to comment on the “hypothetical” future state of the board’s working relationship with Jarmon.