New member Angelia Gordon, president of locally based Angelia Gordon Property Management Inc., tells GlobeSt.com one of the board's priorities will be win back the respectability and credibility it lost during the recent federal investigations of the authority.
"I'm a local and I know these people and my door will always be open to them," Gordon says. "I have already met with most of the tenants and even have an invitation for a collard greens dinner with one family."
A longtime property management professional, Gordon says there won't be any snafus on operating and maintaining the 450 units under her watch. "I know what you have to do to maintain a property and it will be done."
The five-member group replaces the previous board which refused to heed Lessard's order to resign by April 30.
The new board takes over the financial and operational duties at six low-income apartment complexes owned and funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in this blue-collar city of 37,000 residents, 30 miles north of Downtown Orlando.
Normally a low-key operation, the authority drew national attention in the past two months as HUD investigated allegations that $1 million of federal funds could not be immediately accounted for by Timothy D. Hudson, the authority's $113,000-a-year former executive director.
The board eventually located the money but after an audit, ordered the housing board to repay HUD $750,000 of improperly and unauthorized funds used by Hudson.
He is also a private commercial developer whose two companies take on small area projects. Hudson denied to HUD investigators his private businesses conflicted with HUD's operations, as some of his critics maintained. The inspector general's office at HUD is currently running a criminal investigation on those allegations.
Hudson resigned April 20 amid a flurry of accusations on his mismanaging HUD's assets and running the housing agency without any controls from the former board members.
The board itself was castigated by HUD officials for allowing Hudson to operate with a blank check for six years and for not communicating with tenants in the 450 units.
"That will never happen again so far as I am concerned," says Gordon, the property manager. "If they want the minutes of every meeting we hold, they'll get copies of those minutes."
She says the tenants will be invited to all housing authority meetings. "We will have nothing to hide from anybody at any time," Gordon says. "They deserve to know how the government is spending taxpayers' dollars on their behalf."
Besides Gordon, the new board comprises Lonnie Groot, a former deputy Seminole County lawyer and currently a partner in the Orlando law firm of Schutts & Bowen; Joseph Davis, a solo legal practitioner in Orlando; Luis Harris, a CPA with L.F. Harris & Associates, Orlando; and Ethel Tomlin, treasurer of the authority's tenant council.
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