Living on Allied Drive is not easy. Sometimes, “the City” doesn’t “help”.
At their last meeting, the Allied Drive Task Force voted to give a portion of their money ($4,500) to help Allied Drive residents who were either being evicted or their month to month leases were being terminated by a private landlord who was afraid the City would start a nuisance action against them. The task force directed the money to go through the Community Action Coalition (CAC). The Mayor’s office then added $1,900 in additional funds to help the residents.
Sounds wonderful doesn’t it.
Unfortunately, here’s where things start to fall apart. Now, I’m handicapped in that the information surrounding the facts here are confounding. I have been told that there are 11 households involved, as opposed to the 14 originally reported. That seems to be the one consistent fact. There are either 3 or 8 or 5 or 6 families that were “part of the problem” and have too many police calls according to the City Attorney and therefore the funds cannot be used for those families (This wasn’t part of the motion of the Task Force). So the funds can only help 3 or 5 or 6 or 8 households. Channel 3 reported 8 families are being helped, and that is consistent with what I thought (that only three of the households were “part of the problem”) . . . but . . . yesterday after the meeting where the task force tried to ask questions about what happened to the money they gave, a staff person from the CDBG office told me that the contract says that CAC cannot use the money for 8 of the 11 households and that they are specifically listed in the contract. And the $1900 is being used for families that moved into Prairie Crossing because Prairie Crossing hasn’t recieved their “sticky” section 8 vouchers yet. (The City is trying to set up some deal with WHEDA and I think that the vouchers can only be used if the WHEDA funding comes through. The vouchers would stay with the apartment instead of allowing the tenant to move and take the section 8 voucher with them, that’s why it is “sticky”.)
This gets further complicated in that either the City or CAC has insisted that they use “their rules” meaning:
1) The client can only get assistance 1 time in 2 years or 2 times in 5 years
2) The client has to have a sudden and temporary loss of income that lead to their non-payment of rent and show that they will have income to afford their apartment in the future
3) CAC won’t pay for more than one month’s rent
So, of the families that the City Attorney has agreed that the City and CAC can help (3, 5, 6 or 8 families), there are households that don’t qualify and/or if they take the assistance, won’t qualify in the future.
And here is where it gets even more complicated for me . . . putting on my hat as Executive Director of the Tenant Resource Center . . . we have funds to help people and three CAC case managers have called and asked the Tenant Resource Center for funds to help at least one, but possibly more families on Allied Drive, but they’re the agency that has the $4,500 . . . and they apparently can’t use it to help these families! (By the way, when I found out about all of the “rule” confusion and that is was only $300, I offered to pay for it out of the Housing Crisis Fund, which is entirely funded by donations from individuals, but apparently the County is going to pay it instead.)
To add to the mass confusion, most people are on vacation and I can’t get any direct answers to any of my questions. And much more importantly, this is causing way too much stress for the families involved and further eroding what little trust the Allied Drive residents have in the City.
