Housing authority called ‘high performer’ on federal report cards
The Fayette County Housing Authority has achieved “high performer” status for the 2003-04 fiscal year on both its public housing and Section 8 federal report cards, Executive Director Thomas L. Harkless said Tuesday. Harkless noted that the authority’s 90 percent score on the Public Housing Assessment System represented a dramatic increase from the failing 43 percent score that had the authority mired in “troubled” status when he took over in 1999.
The agency’s top administrator said the authority also got a 93 percent score on the Section 8 Management Assessment Program, another key barometer monitored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Since both scores were at or above the 90th percentile, the authority qualifies as a “high performer” in the respective HUD scoring systems. Harkless said this marks the first time in his tenure that the authority has earned that status under either grading system, and he thinks it may be the first time Section 8 has been so honored in authority history.
“That’s not bad, taking the report card from all F’s (five years ago) to all A’s,” said Harkless, who added that the turnaround wasn’t surprising. “We’ve got a lot of hard-working people here. I think that’s where we should be.
“The board sets our five-year plan, and we’ve stuck to it pretty much. We stuck to that blueprint pretty much over the last five years. Now we’re in the cycle where we’re putting it together for the next five years.”
Harkless said that the high-performer label qualifies the authority to get as much as a 10 percent boost, or up to an extra $300,000, in its $3 million annual capital grants allocation from HUD. “It should increase a little bit,” he said, noting that much depends on HUD’s own funding from the federal government.
The authority’s grade last year on PHAS (public housing) was 87 percent and on SEMAP (Section 8) was 85 percent, Harkless said. It has not earned high performer status under PHAS or its precursor grading systems in at least 10 years, back when the grading system was less scrutinized by HUD, he said.