KILLEEN, Texas — Months after the Central Texas Council of Governments (CTCOG) agreed to allow tenants under the Killeen Housing Authority (KHA) to be transferred to their housing program, some tenants still have yet to be transferred.
The KHA held a special board meeting on Monday, Dec. 4 to come to a final resolution on transferring people under both housing choice and project-based voucher programs.
A housing choice voucher is when a tenant lives somewhere that is not owned by the housing authority, whereas a project-based voucher is when a tenant does live in a place owned by the housing authority.
The meeting became quite tense and took over an hour to adjourn.
By the end of the meeting, the board decided to approve the 87 housing choice vouchers and not the 145 project-based vouchers. This came after board commissioner Justin Hartsfield believed the board needed more time to understand what the decision would mean for the KHA moving forward.
"My biggest thing about this is to make sure that we're informed for the best interest of the residents," Hartsfield explained in the meeting.
The KHA owns both the Hyde Estates and the High View Place apartment complexes. One of the concerns Hartsfield mentioned was the chance that the KHA would not have any sort of funding coming in if they transferred all of their tenants, especially their project-based voucher tenants.
Project-based vouchers come with administrative fees and those fees are what help most housing authorities run. Without receiving those fees, the KHA would not see any sort of revenue coming in.
There are still residents whose landlords have not received any sort of rent payments, so board commissioner Ebony Jackson believes transferring tenants' paperwork is the best option, as staffing issues are still plaguing the KHA.
"Their Section 8 program is stable, they're consistent, they've got staff, they have money, they have reserve funding," Jackson said. "This is the proper thing to do for our tenants."
At the meeting, CTCOG Executive Director Jim Reed suggested the board members take the time to sit down, organize the KHA's finances and iron out the details pertaining to their tenants.
"They should be generating more admin fees and build off a reserve," Reed explained. "What happened with the KHA is they were spending more admin fee than they were getting and they ran out of money. That's why the staff initially quit."
Reed said the next step is to send the House of Urban Development (HUD) a synopsis of what was agreed upon in the meeting.
6 News reached out to the HUD asking them about this situation and received this statement from HUD spokesperson Scott Hudman:
The most important thing to understand is that if a tenant is qualified for the housing they won’t lose assistance. In fact, it’s against HUD rules to evict a tenant due to a Public Housing Authority’s failure to make a HAP contract payment to the owner. The specific language of the HUD HAP Contract Part C Tenancy Addendum states that “A PHA failure to pay the housing assistance payment to the owner is not a violation of the lease. The owner may not terminate the tenancy of non-payment of the PHA housing assistance payment.” Nevertheless, we take tenant concerns very seriously and are working with units of local government to resolve this situation and ensure that tenants’ rights are protected.
6 News will continue following this story as it develops.
More from 6 News: