The Voluntary Compliance Agreement and Memorandum of Understanding, which was not available to the Journal-News late Monday, calls for the city’s housing board to give all of its 1,662 Section 8 vouchers assigned by HUD to the Butler Metro and Warren Metro housing authorities, according to city Law Director Les Landen.
Butler Metro Housing Authority Executive Director Phyllis Hitte declined to comment because HUD has not yet issued a statement. Butler Metro does handle more than 1,100 Section 8 vouchers and Warren Metro handles nearly 450 Section 8 vouchers. The potential agreement will give housing authorities in each Butler and Warren counties control of all of the Section 8 vouchers assigned to the respective counties.
“At this point, we were the only housing authority in the state of Ohio that was running on a municipal basis other than one other city, and that city had been ordered to do so by the courts,” said City Manager Doug Adkins. “We just thought that the counties would be the more appropriate entities to administer this very valuable public resource.”
The MPHA approved a plan in October 2012 that would reduce its vouchers to 654, which is what city officials said Middletown could support in subsidized housing. Subsidized housing in the city includes the Section 8 voucher program with Middletown and Butler Metro and Low-Income Tax Credit Housing. The cut was designed to allow Middletown to only have 10 percent of its housing stock as subsidized housing.
Until Dec. 1, 1999, the city had 774 Section 8 vouchers. But from 1999 to 2005, the city accepted 888 vouchers in order to reduce the vacancy rates of older and less-desirable homes, and to ensure that housing remained in compliance with city code, according to the plan that prompted HUD officials to ask Middletown to reconsider its position.
Middletown landlord Dan Tracy said he’s not surprised by the presumptive action that is anticipated to happen Tuesday evening. He feels Middletown’s Section 8 program needed to be “cleaned up with stricter rules.”
“The city didn’t accomplish what they wanted to accomplish by doing things the wrong way,” Tracy said. “I think that (the Section 8 program) will be run as it is across the United States.”
According to the latest report, the city has just more than 1,300 Section 8 vouchers.
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