Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to this amendment.

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Ms. MAXINE WATERS of California. Mr. Chairman and Members, I have serious concerns about providing a permanent exemption for the listed entities from existing requirements that each public housing authority must have a resident commissioner serve on the governing board.

In 1998, Congress passed this requirement into law in recognition of the need for the perspective and participation of tenants in the governance of public housing authorities. To this day, this requirement helps to ensure that residents are included in board-level decisionmaking.

However, in appropriations bills over the last decade, four entities have received an exemption from this requirement so long as they maintain a separate advisory board with at least six residents of public or assisted housing.

The Housing Authority of the County of Los Angeles is one of the four entities that received this exemption. However, last year I learned that HACOLA was not in compliance with the part of the exemption that requires that they maintain an advisory board of at least six residents, and this noncompliance had been going on for many years.

HACOLA's noncompliance resulted in a lack of meaningful engagement by residents on important policy issues affecting programs that HACOLA administers.

I successfully offered an amendment in the funding year 2016 housing funding bill to strike HACOLA's exemption. While this amendment was ultimately not included in the final omnibus, it did put Congress, HUD, and the Housing Authority on notice that failure to comply with this important law is simply unacceptable.

This demonstrates that we need to be extremely careful when providing exemptions for a requirement as important as this one. The exemption for HACOLA and others was intended to provide them with special accommodations while still ensuring meaningful tenant engagement. But HACOLA's behavior displayed blatant disregard for the law and the intent behind the law.

That is why I do not believe that we should be making this exemption permanent. Instead, I think we should be thinking about ways to enhance compliance with the existing exemption requirements.

For these reasons, of course I am going to urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this amendment.

Mr. Chairman and Members, it is just inconceivable that we don't understand that, if you want to not only educate tenants, but want to involve tenants in decisionmaking and help them to understand how democracy works and help them to understand the rules of public housing and what can and cannot be done and why these rules are adopted--if we don't understand that, we don't understand anything.

It is inconceivable to me that we would simply say that we do not want just one commissioner, one resident, to be a part of the governing board, and it is inconceivable to me that we don't understand that we allow for exemptions to say: Okay. If you don't want just one commissioner to serve on the board with you, we will allow you to have an advisory board of six residents that could involve themselves in the decisions that are made by the governing board.

I talk about this importance because I think it is so important, as we engage and lift people out of poverty, that they understand the rules of the game. The only way you get to understand the rules of the game is if you get to play. You get to understand how decisions are made. You get to understand what the rules are and how government works. To exclude them does not make good sense to me.

Now, I know why my own county would like to have this done. They would like to have this done because--guess what. We discovered that they were trying to sell off 241 units of Section 8-type housing at the same time that they were providing the museum with over $120 million, and they said they could not afford the upkeep of those units.

They didn't like it that we went out and talked with the residents. I went out to the homes and I said: Did you know that these units are about to be sold? Do you know what is going to happen to you and why the county is giving up these units?

No. They didn't know. They didn't have a clue because they didn't have proper notification. They didn't have one resident that served on the governing board. They didn't have an advisory committee, even though L.A. County had gotten an exemption. They refused to even comply with the exemption to simply have an advisory board.

This is not right. This does not make good sense. I don't know why you would support something like this. I urge a ``no'' vote on this amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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