Housing authority quagmire

After a confusing series of letters and orders from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Rockville Centre Housing Authority has done away with having tenant representatives from the Old Mill Court complex on its board of trustees.

The trouble began last year, after Old Mill Court residents Herbert Coleman and Cynthia Fielder-Boyd were elected tenant representatives. HUD said that the two couldn’t be on the housing authority board because Old Mill Court no longer receives federal funds, and according to HUD regulations, at least one tenant representative must live in a federally subsidized building. In this case that’s Rockville Manor, also known as 579 Merrick Road.

After Coleman and Fielder-Boyd, who are both black, were removed from the board, there were accusations of racial bias, which Gary Kondor, chairman of the housing authority’s board of commissioners, denies.

After months of back-and-forth correspondences among HUD, the housing authority and New York state, the original HUD decision stands: Residents of Old Mill Court can no longer be tenant representatives.

“HUD said the tenant reps must come from the subsidized facility, and that’s 579 Merrick Road,” said Jamie Morrison, the housing authority’s executive director. “They said the tenant reps that came from Old Mill Court weren’t eligible to be on the board.”

Originally, the housing authority allowed anyone from either of the two facilities to run for the position. The problem is that no one who lives at 579 Merrick wants the job of tenant representative, which was why Coleman and Fielder-Boyd were elected in the first place.

“What we’re required to do by the federal government is each year, offer it to [residents of 579 Merrick],” Kondor said. “And if they want to become [a tenant representative], they will. If they don’t, they decline and there’s no election. But we have to offer it to them. Which we did. We hand-delivered letters to every single person in the building, and nobody wanted it.”

Right now, the housing authority’s board of commissioners is made up of five people, including Kondor, who were appointed by Mayor Francis X. Murray and his predecessors. Because residents of 579 Merrick declined to become members, there are no tenant representatives.

But Kondor said that residents can still represent themselves. “They can still come to the public meeting and voice their opinion,” he said. “The idea of the [tenant] board member is that they could have gone to them during the week and said something, and then the board member would have been at the meeting. Now they just have to come to the meetings and speak for themselves.”

Both Kondor and Morrison said that they had not heard complaints from residents about the lack of representation on the board. And it seems unlikely that things are going to change soon.

“We made recommendations to HUD on how to change [the situation],” Morrison said, “and they didn’t approve.”