Kemp Pledges to Halt GOP Influence Peddling

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp declared Tuesday that he will take back his agency from “Republican influence peddlers.”

In a well-received speech before the National Urban League’s annual conference here, Kemp declared also that he intends to help America’s blacks achieve the long-elusive promise of equality.

Kemp’s scandal-plagued agency is the subject of investigations into charges that funds for low-income housing have been siphoned off to pay consulting fees to the rich and influential, but Kemp pledged to “make HUD work.”

Reforms Promised

“We’re going to make it work for the poor and the needy. We’re going to take the greedy and the consultants and the Republican influence peddlers out,” he said. “You can count on me to reform HUD from top to bottom. I’ve got the President on my side, and I know I’ve got the American people on my side.

“I don’t want it to work for the Democratic National Committee; it shouldn’t work for the Republican National Committee. It’s got to work for the people.”

The secretary characterized his efforts to revitalize HUD as “cleaning it out and making it work for poor people, not greedy people.”

Kemp’s remarks were interrupted frequently by applause. He invoked the American Revolution’s dream of liberty as well as imagery from the Civil War and the current anniversary of the government’s “War on Poverty” as he made an impassioned plea for his free market solution to racial and economic injustice.

The speech implicitly acknowledged what one league officer called the government’s “meanness” and neglect of the problems of the poor and minorities during the Ronald Reagan Administration.

After saying that “there is a burgeoning revolt on the greed that has dominated our national life,” Kemp added that HUD will work “on behalf of those who have been left behind.”

He lamented the low levels of black home ownership and called for greater investment in new and rehabilitated housing.

Kemp urged an end to “the disgrace of redlining,” a practice in which lenders write off impoverished areas as bad risks. He called for a reduction in taxes, both for the rich and poor, to spur the economy.

“We can’t have a country that is prosperous and poor,” he said.

Kemp recalled how, in the 1950s and ‘60s, when he played professional football, he was unaware of the civil rights movement.

“I didn’t realize that something was happening in America that would help complete the American Revolution,” he said. “That revolution is still unfinished.”

He noted that the Urban League has set a goal of racial parity by the year 2000 and promised to participate in the effort.

“We’re 11 years away,” he said. “It’s time to get started.”

Meanwhile, in Denver, the Department of Justice filed a $1-million civil suit Tuesday against Douglas R. Turner, a former HUD accountant accused of stealing money earmarked for low-income families. The suit seeks possession of a car and real estate that Turner allegedly purchased with the money.

The suit alleges that Turner set up a phony company and funneled Section 8 moderate rehabilitation program funds into it between December, 1988, and May, 1989. A criminal investigation is also under way, Denver U.S. Atty. Michael J. Norton said.

Kemp did not mention the lawsuit in his comments to the Urban League, but he said that he is working hard to make the agency “open for business.”