4/18/22, 8:52 AM Mail - Agendadesk - Outlook
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Item 8.1 CC 4 19 22 slap in face to HCDC
martha O'Connell <
Mon 4/18/2022 7:48 AM
To: Agendadesk < Taber, Toni <
Submitted as a citizen pursuant to First Amendment rights.
I am in my 17th year of attending meetings of the HCDC. When it was three separate Commissions, I attended all the Mobile Advisory Commission meetings and most of the Housing Commission meetings and Apartment Rent Commission meetings.
I frequently wondered then, as I wonder now, why the City does not just abolish the HCDC since the Housing Department so often disregards its recommendations and/or slants the reporting of their discussions to Council.
Such is the case today with Item 8 1 adding a seat on the HCDC to represent the homeless or formerly homeless
In its staff memorandum, Housing currently reports on page 3 that at its 2-10- 22 meeting, the HCDC unanimously passed a motion that the person filling the new seat should have been homeless within the last three years. Then on page 4 it categorically advises against the unanimous HCDC recommendation stating that “the length and period” of homeless experience should not determine eligibility
That is patently absurd.
Right now an attorney and a former city employee, and other now financially secure and housed individuals, would be eligible to fill the homeless seat because they had “lived experience” years and years ago. This makes a travesty of the proposed new seat and is a slap in the face to the HCDC which engaged in lengthy discussion of this issue
4/18/22, 8:52 AM Mail - Agendadesk - Outlook
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Council should vote to accept the recommendation from the HCDC that the person filling the new seat should have been homeless within the last three years.
Housing also omitted the concerns expressed by more than one current HCDC Commissioner that the “buddy system” may result in new Commissioners feeling pressure to vote the way their “buddy” does Nowhere in the Housing staff memo was this important fact revealed. It is passed off with the comment that “Commissioners have expressed an interest in being a volunteer body.” Finally, to pay the person filling this seat a monthly stipend of $200 without regard to current financial need is another travesty.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality Desmond Tutu