HUD gets tough

It comes as no surprise that the troubled Pleasant Point Passamaquoddy Housing Authority is under special scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. With HUD’s own history of mismanagement, the federal agency knows it when it sees it.

Despite strong evidence that the tribe’s housing authority has made substantial progress in cleaning up the mess left behind by its former director, HUD is still in its punishment mode. And who better to punish than 34 Passamaquoddy construction workers in a community where half the people are out of work?

Last year, HUD suspended housing funds after an investigation uncovered a staggering list of questionable activities that occured under the directorship of Pamela Francis: her own massive HUD-financed home (known locally as The Mansion), for which she pays $133 a month on a household income of $75,000; her sale to the tribe for $84,000 a house she bought from a her son for $1; her attempt to have taxpayers pick up the $15,000 tab for moving her horse barn. Then there’s allegations of making improper loans, misuse of the tribe’s tax-exempt number; co-mingling funds, funny paperwork.

Francis has been fired. The paperwork has been straightened up, the books put in order. But Francis still dwells in The Mansion and until that legal tangle is resolved, HUD says the carpenters must suffer. Instead of being allowed to put itself to work, the tribe now must put its construction projects out to bid. Given the size of the contracts — dozens of homes going up at a time — it is unlikely the locals will be able to compete with large builders.

The argument can be made that the sole objective here should be the decent housing at the lowest cost, but the federal Indian housing program always has tried to combine that with job creation. It may not be the absolute height of efficiency, but the reality of life on a remote reservation makes it proper and necessary.

It is not hard to figure out why HUD suddenly is so self-righteous. The department in general and its Indian housing program in particular have been cited for years by the General Accounting Office as especially rife with waste, fraud and abuse. HUD has shelled out more than $3 billion of the taxpayers’ money for Indian housing, yet hundreds of thousands of Indians still live in shacks or worse.

The GAO warnings didn’t have much impact upon HUD, but a scathing series of Pulitzer-winning stories late last year by the Seattle Times sure did. Every day for a solid week, the Times’ front page detailed outrages — self-enrichment, political favoritism, downright thievery — occuring on reservations coast to coast, all done under HUD supervision. Francis was not the only housing director with a mansion.

But her shenanigans were so exemplary, they were singled out for a story all their own. HUD did not even know, until the Times told it so, that Francis went from being fired at Pleasant Point to being hired by the HUD-financed National American Indian Housing Council to train housing authority staff and directors.

HUD blew it. HUD was exposed. HUD now has a choice: It can help rebuild the housing programs it had a hand in destroying; or it can punish tribal carpenters and their families because, even though innocent of any wrongdoing, they’re easy targets. The choice HUD has made now, like so many it’s made in the past, is the wrong one.