DHA New Leadership Three Big Blunders

Dallas Morning News Editorial Board (The Palin Group) /James Ragland and Others. Hounded the Mayor until he appointed new Leadership to the Dallas Housing Authority Board. Sure have gotten a dozy of new Leadership. The Dallas Morning News Editorial even questions the wisdom of appointing Terdema Ussery but said he should bring the financial wisdom to the organization. First off Terdema is a fine fellow and has moved up in the Maverick organization, he is a contract manager and negotiator. Mr.Ussery works in an environment with little governance and regulatory control.
Mr. Ussery also works with an Owner with never ending money and he does not use HUD money with Federal regulation. The Owner even had his own Federal regulation problems lately. There is a big difference in Public and Private funding.

The new Leadership has already made three big errors:

1, changing the Board members names and pictures in the 2007-2008 Annual report, after being advised by staff not to. The Annual Report covered activities performed under the old Board members and should have reflected that, the new Board will appear in the 2009 Annual report.

2, when interviewing the candidates for the President/CEO position the New Leadership called in the Director of HR a subordinate of the intrim President/CEO who they were interviewing and ask her about his Qualification for the job. The Board did not call any other HR director of the other candidates. How can you ask a subordinate to judge the qualification of her Boss? Maybe they do that in the NBA but not in the real world.

3, Chairman Ussery has named seven people to his advisory committee. All are nice people but none have any knowledge of Public housing and none represent the interest of the Residents. Three are builders/developers one of which has a contractual relationship with DHA which is clearly a conflict, the other a sports and entertainment guy, college chancellor who also has contractual contact with DHA, PR firm owner. Not one person who has contact with the community that they serve. HUD/ Mike Daniels will have a ball with this group if anything they recommend to the Board is done. The new President has already said before one day in the Office she wants to inventory DHA assets.
I would hope she would first want to see first how far the Agency has come with the OIG audits.

I will keep reporting on the updates. Ms Russ does know HUD she worked with the Clinton administration in HUD. I just hope the politicians will not try and run the agency into the ground with a fight over little Mexico. Mr. Ussery will have another conflict with that property since the AAC is in the 200 foot notification of the Little Mexico property.