Housing Agency Gets Fresh Start : Smith’s Early Resignation After Embattled Years Is Relief to All
He has been upbraided in public meetings, criticized in performance reports, assailed by his own employees and hounded by investigations of his agency.
But until his sudden resignation last week as executive director of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority, Homer Smith was a determined fighter. He persevered with the backing of top city officials, from Mayor Tom Bradley on down.
During the last year, however, his support at City Hall has gradually eroded. His recent refusal to implement management reforms ordered by the City Council brought tempers to the boiling point and put Smith on a collision course with even some of his longtime supporters.
Friends, Foes Agree
In the end, both friends and foes agreed that Smith’s early resignation from the Housing Authority--one year before his contract was due to expire--brought a happy ending to some long and bitter battles that marked his six-year tenure.
Both Smith and the housing commissioners who supervised him seemed relieved by his resignation.
Assistant City Atty. Dov Lesel, who negotiated Smith’s contract termination, said, “I think he’s happy to be away from it all, and I think they’re happy he didn’t stick around.”
To speed Smith’s departure, the commission agreed to pay him $103,805.84, amounting to a year’s salary of about $77,000 plus a negotiation of his claim for 1,605 hours of sick and vacation time. The money will be paid to Smith from Housing Authority funds on the effective date of his resignation, Jan. 17. Until then, he is on vacation.
Compensation Claim
Besides the lump-sum payment, Lesel said, Smith may recover some money from a worker’s compensation claim he has filed seeking reimbursement of medical expenses arising from work-related stress.
Furthermore, state retirement officials calculated that Smith is guaranteed a lifetime yearly pension of about $25,000 for his service with the Housing Authority, which began 27 years ago when he went to work as a security patrolman.
A source in the city attorney’s office said Smith resigned because the financial package was “the best . . . he was ever going to get” and the commission accepted the resignation because “it was cheaper to buy out his contract than to prolong this torture any longer.”
After tendering his resignation Nov. 15, Smith later appeared relaxed--almost chipper--as he talked and chuckled with reporters about his announcement and his immediate vacation plans to relax, play tennis and ride his bike along the ocean.
Smith explained that he is tired and that his resignation will give “a fresh start” to the Housing Authority, which has a $175-million budget to shelter the city’s poor in 21 housing projects and more than 30,000 subsidized houses and apartments.
Since Smith’s announcement, employee morale has soared, agency officials report. Finance Director Robert Zampino described the mood as “very upbeat.”
‘Could Not Go On’
The commission accepted Smith’s resignation Friday without discussion. But Commissioner Dori Pye later explained in an interview: “We could not go on for another year like this. It would have been a total disaster.”
The seven-member commission, appointed by Mayor Bradley, recently relieved the City Council of its supervision of the Housing Authority. The council, at Bradley’s request, had spent two years trying to put the troubled agency on a steady course. A structural overhaul of the agency was mapped out by the council and the new commissioners have been trying to implement the reforms over Smith’s strenuous objections.
Holding long Friday afternoon meetings that have sometimes run until midnight, the new commissioners have earned a reputation for hard work. Pye, the commission’s spokeswoman, said she is eager to press forward with the difficult task of building more low-income housing in the city, “but first we wanted to get all this garbage cleared up.”
The trouble, Pye said, stemmed largely from personnel turmoil created by Smith’s leadership of the agency and especially his reliance on an aggressive top aide, Ida Arestad, who was demoted after Smith resigned.
“She was running the show, and there was tremendous mutiny and friction,” Pye said. “The turnover (of personnel) was outrageous. And the treatment of top employees was terrible, almost childlike. We asked that it not be so tyrannical but our requests fell on deaf ears. We were being defied.”
During Smith’s tenure, whistle-blowers were routinely fired or banished to outlying agency offices. In six years, Smith went through six heads of personnel, six finance chiefs, four purchasing chiefs, four heads of housing production and two heads of security. Among the top 20 management posts, there was a 75% turnover rate.
35 Reforms Sought
The management overhaul--consisting of 35 specific reforms--was designed by the council to prevent Smith from making dictatorial personnel moves and to force him to follow strict budgetary practices.
“Homer was not committed to following through, so for that reason it may be a good thing” that he is now retiring, said City Council President Pat Russell, who in the past has defended Smith against repeated demands for his ouster.
Smith acknowledged his opposition to the reforms: “Sometimes when one is in a position for a long time they have their own ideas about the way things should function. A lot of people resist change. Maybe I wasn’t as objective as I should have been.”
Audits, Reports Critical
The restructuring plan mapped out by the council followed a string of critical audits and performance reports criticizing Smith for bad contracting practices, wasteful spending, and unjustifiable personnel moves.
Allegations of mismanagement published by The Times in December of 1982 prompted investigations by the district attorney, who has since cleared Smith of criminal misconduct, and by the FBI. The charges of mismanagement--which included reports that Smith had circumvented competitive bidding practices and made unauthorized payments to an architect--prompted Mayor Bradley to order an internal Housing Authority investigation.
The internal investigation, conducted by a Washington law firm, ended with a $40,000 bill and a 90-page report analyzing 22 charges and recommending nine reforms. However, the board of commissioners then supervising Smith bristled at the criticism and refused to adopt all the recommendations. In disgust, Bradley dissolved the board and put the City Council in charge of the Housing Authority instead.
Supervised by Council
For two years, the council supervised the agency’s operation, grappling not only with major policy decisions but with tedious minutiae--debating, for example, whether to buy automatic or manually defrosting refrigerators for the agency’s 31,000 low-income housing units.
Even as the council attempted to put old controversies to rest, new ones arose.
An assistant finance officer--who was later fired and has since sued Smith--publicly charged that the agency had given big rent increases and favorable treatment to a public housing landlord, Charles H. Thomas, whose units were so badly deteriorated in some cases that they flunked agency inspections. A city report on the matter is still pending.
Police Investigation
Meanwhile, earlier this year, the Los Angeles Police Department opened criminal investigation of agency officials. In October, a longtime top aide to Smith was charged with diverting agency materials and supplies, including a portable toilet, to a home he was building for himself in Riverside County.
Commission Chairman Alvin Greene said that the police investigation was not related in any way to Smith’s resignation.
Greene said that the commission will conduct a nationwide search for a new executive director, and that in the meantime a committee of five top housing authority managers will help run the agency on a daily basis.
One top priority is to reduce the agency’s deficit to where it is manageable, said Zampino, the finance director who heads the new committee.
Smith has long boasted of putting the Housing Authority on a solid financial footing. But this year, Zampino said, the agency has slipped into the red. “We’re moving to reduce deficits to a manageable level,” he said.
