Housing Authority's marathon meeting produces new leader but little progress

Yahoo

11-04-2025

In a Wednesday meeting that lasted nearly three hours, Meadville Housing Authority's sharply divided board managed to elect a new leader but failed to find consensus on a conflict of interest involving the new chair, leaving several tenants with an uncertain housing future.
The board also heard from three local social services agencies that may — and in many cases may not — be able to offer help with tenants whose poor housekeeping habits have contributed to intractable bedbug infestations. And as Joe Tompkins, the newly elected chair, led the board through a variety of issues that have been discussed in recent months, tie votes stymied progress when one member departed after about two hours.
The most significant tie votes came, however, when Tompkins recused himself on two votes concerning his conflict of interest. Tompkins' wife, Julie Wilson, is executive director of the local housing nonprofit Common Roots, an agency which contracts with the Housing Authority for three housing choice vouchers in a program commonly referred to as Section 8 housing.
Progress on resolving the conflict has been slow. Tompkins was appointed to the board by Meadville City Council in September and delayed formally joining it until November as the board has continued to seek guidance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on how best to handle the situation.
Board members considered two options Wednesday. One option proposed to cancel the authority's contracts with Common Roots, assist the affected tenants with finding new housing and pay for the moving costs. The other proposed to seek a waiver of the conflict from HUD, the federal agency that funds the authority, that would allow Tompkins to continue as a board member while refraining from voting on any matters pertaining to Common Roots.
Votes on both options resulted in 2-2 ties and, with no majority, both options failed.
Uncertain future
What happens next for the tenants is unclear, but the clock is ticking: one lease expires at the end of the month, another next month, Executive Director Vanessa Rockovich said after the meeting.
'As long as Joe remains on the board, then we're stuck,' she said. 'Easy resolution is, he could resign. HUD offices have been asking him to, so I don't understand the reason why we're going through this.'
The City Council members who appointed him have repeatedly expressed their support for Tompkins continuing on the board and he has shown no inclination to resign.
Like Rockovich, however, Tompkins had a hard time understanding why board members declined to move forward with what could prove an easy solution. If HUD were to grant a waiver, the leases for the Common Roots tenants could be extended, allowing them to stay in their homes, he said.
Board member Marcia Yohe, who voted with Richard Zinn in favor of canceling the contracts and against asking for a waiver, said that she wanted to know what sanctions HUD would impose on the authority before voting to seek a waiver.
'The choice before you was clear, right?' Tompkins said after Yohe and Zinn voted against applying for the waiver. 'You're willing to risk the sanctions rather than simply request the waiver?'
A pattern of conflict
The conflict was emblematic of a pattern that has emerged in recent months and that was amplified Wednesday. Again and again, the desire of the board's three newest members — Tompkins, Cena Kneubehl and Jane Osborne — to move forward with their priorities clashed with the preferences of the two longer-tenured members, Yohe and Zinn, and the authority's executive director, Rockovich.
The new members pressed repeatedly to adopt motions that they proposed on the spot or to direct Rockovich to return next month with draft versions of new policies. Rockovich in turn said that the formal policies being proposed weren't needed and in some cases already existed. Rather than vote for motions being proposed and revised during the meeting, Yohe and Zinn asked to see more formal written versions at the next meeting and cautioned against moving too fast or overloading an already overworked staff.
In a signal of what was to come, even approving the minutes from the board's March meeting proved too large a task. As the first vote of the meeting, approving the minutes is typically a formality that passes unanimously with no comments from board members. This month, however, the board voted to table its approval of the minutes when Tompkins started the meeting with approximately half a dozen requests for extensive changes to the summary of last month's meeting that had been submitted by Rockovich.
In addition to the vote on the March minutes, a vote on the April treasurer's report was also tabled — Tompkins and Kneubehl said they had not had sufficient time to review the report, which they received less than 48 hours before the meeting despite having requested more timely delivery.
'You may have the gavel'
When the issue of electing a new chair came up, Zinn proposed tabling that matter as well. The board has been without a chair since City Council appointed Osborne in February to fill the seat previously held by Chairwoman Sonya Logan, whose term had expired. Zinn, the board's vice chair, has presided over the March meeting and much of the meeting Wednesday.
Assured by their attorney that the election could take place this month since it was included on the meeting's agenda, Tompkins volunteered to serve as chair and Zinn quickly seconded the motion, which was just as quickly approved as the meeting continued into its third hour. When Tompkins asked if he should preside over the remainder of the meeting, Zinn's response reflected the frustrations that have grown increasingly evident since Tompkins joined the board in November.
'You may have the gavel, sir, and I may leave soon,' Zinn told Tompkins, 'because I don't intend to listen to a lot more of this crap.'
Zinn remained, however, as Tompkins continued down a list of eight more concerns that had been placed on the agenda at his request during the March meeting.
First up was the issue of annual housekeeping inspections, which have not been conducted regularly in recent years. Last month, Tompkins, with a consensus of other board members, requested that Rockovich draft a procedure for handling such inspections and informing tenants of the results.
Rockovich acknowledged that she had not done so and said that HUD requirements for the end of the authority's fiscal year prevented her from doing so. She also said that the direction to produce the procedure had come primarily from Tompkins and not in a formal vote from the board as a whole.
'We did have a consensus,' Kneubehl said, 'and the majority voted that we wanted that.'
'OK,' Rockovich replied, 'well, I don't have it.'
What's next?
The votes on whether to cancel the Common Roots contracts or seek a waiver for Tompkins' conflict of interest came after board members heard from residents who would be affected by the decision. In a letter read to the board by a Common Roots staff member, resident Daniel Fronce described living in his Market Street apartment with Section 8 assistance for nearly 30 years.
Aware that his lease would soon expire, Fronce wrote that despite repeated attempts to reach Housing Authority staff members since last month, he has heard nothing back.
'I do not want to move,' Fronce wrote. 'I like where I live and I want to stay here.'
Another letter from Common Roots Section 8 resident Jason Burrows told board members that since June he and his family have lived in the house that Burrows grew up in. The location is within walking distance of his job and his doctor, Burrows added, and has benefited the family in a variety of ways.
'Please look into your hearts,' he wrote, 'and let us stay in my childhood home and continue to make my new memories.'
The prospect of the leases not being renewed was worrying to Fronce's sister, Rebecca Stirling, who also addressed the board, saying that finding new housing for her brother on short notice would likely be impossible given the short supply of Section 8 housing.
'Why didn't somebody tell him three months ago that this was going to be a problem?' Stirling asked.
'Someone needs to take responsibility for this. It's not like a little thing — you're messing with people's lives here.'
For Jackie Commins, president of the Holland Towers Resident Council, the message from the increasing tension among board members and the persistence of problems that have plagued her building for years was clear. Addressing board members at the beginning of the meeting, she called on them to elect a new chair and 'deal with the outcome.'
'It is evident the power of the board has shifted,' Commins said, 'and most of the board members believe that the board's role is to hold the executive director accountable.'