Officials at the Metropolitan Housing Alliance, Little Rock’s independent public housing authority, are proposing a four-day workweek and other measures to absorb federal cutbacks that are trimming about $680,000 in agency funding.
Alliance Executive Director Rodney Forte presented a series of potential cuts Tuesday at a Metropolitan Housing Alliance board meeting. The board did not vote on the measures but will revisit them at its next meeting.
The funding loss comes as a result of the federal sequestration - a 5 percent across-the-board cut for discretionary federal spending, including the budget for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The alliance receives most of its funding from HUD.
The federal cuts will affect the alliance in two ways: a 19 percent cut to its public housing operational budget and a 6 percent cut to its Section 8 low-income rent assistance program. Public housing in Little Rock will take a $342,280 budget hit, and Section 8 will lose $325,323.
“We are in budget concern mode at this point,” Forte said. “We’re still doing all that we can, but the reality is … they’re asking us to do even more with even less.”
The Metropolitan Housing Alliance manages more than $37 million in property and provides housing to about 8,000 Little Rock residents through various programs, including more than 2,000 Section 8 vouchers.
Forte, who has held the director position since December, presented several scenarios to adjust for the cuts in the agency’s operations budget.
He proposed eliminating overlap in the tenant-grievance process, which would limit the number of hearings a tenant could request to one per complaint. The current process allows two hearings, which the staff said ties up more time than necessary.
Forte said he also wanted to cut back staff hours to a four-day workweek, or 32 hours a week. Staff members estimated the move would save the agency $87,394 between now and the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.
“A lot of agencies and HUD itself are cutting back to a four-day week to handle some of this,” he said. “We looked at a lot of different options and found that we really don’t get the financial benefit from just furloughing individual employees for a period of time. To get the full financial benefit … utilities and everything else, we need to cut our overall hours.”
He said the agency is looking into some electronic systems and software upgrades that would ease the effect on residents and also eliminate some administrative work.
Forte proposed cutting expenses by about 20 percent by reducing spending limits at public housing sites to $100 without agency approval, collecting rent at the public housing sites instead of the main office, reducing the agency match for retirement benefits to 5 percent and allowing employees to opt out of the retirement plan.
He also gave the board options to eliminate one part-time position, one maintenance position and two assistant manager positions, which would save the agency more than $114,000.
Without cutting the positions, the board would have to approve dipping into the agency’s reserve funds for about $187,696. Even with those layoffs, the board would still have to use a portion of the reserves - with the amount depending on what other measures are taken.
The alliance received about $1.63 million in operating subsidies from HUD in 2012 and before the sequester was supposed to receive about $1.59 million. With the federal cuts, the agency will receive about $1.29 million.
Little Rock Director Ken Richardson asked about a newspaper advertisement he said he saw over the weekend, looking to hire an assistant executive director for the agency. The ad did not include a salary amount, but Richardson asked whether the additional expense had been built into the budget.
Forte said he planned to move forward with hiring an assistant executive director to make sure the agency could run if he was on vacation or if he were to leave.
“That was the board’s direction to me. I was tasked with making sure that this agency can operate efficiently and properly if something were to happen,” he said. “That was a priority that was articulated to me.”
The agency operated with an assistant executive director before 2004, when Shelly Ehenger became interim director and was eventually hired into the director’s position full time.
The agency will also slice its Section 8 budget.
The alliance received about $10.5 million in Section 8 fees and program reserves in 2012, which will now drop to $10.17 million.
Forte said some of those cuts will be absorbed by not filling vacancies when people leave the program. He said the agency could save as much as $84,000 by putting a freeze on new vouchers.
Staff members said they are also looking to cut about $80,000 from rent portability payments, which are given when a Section 8 resident from another area requests to move to Little Rock and transfers his voucher eligibility, rather than starting at the back of the waiting list.
Staff members said they planned to be more critical of those requests, rejecting those with much higher rental-assistance rates than the Little Rock market would normally allow. They also plan to bill the originating housing authority for qualifying vouchers.
Even with those measures, Forte said the agency would likely need to spend about $161,300 in reserve funding.
He said the staff will continue to look at other measures, such as cutting some utility allowances, reviewing rental rates and equalizing reimbursements with fair market rents.
Commissioner Kenyon Lowe asked Forte to also look into whether the agency could raise rents on its market-rate properties in mixed-income developments.
“I want to tell you yes, but I don’t know if the market will bare any more,” he said. “The answer is, we will look into everything.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/27/2013