hello everyone thank you for tuning into this live candidates debate between the candidates for the housing authority race in the upcoming town election april nd two thousand and nineteen i'm joanna jewell is senior multimedia journalist for wicked local belmont and the belmont citizen herald and i'm going to be cool moderating this debate with cool moderator roger colton rodger is host of the podcast community conversations and he's also co host of belmont journal which is both shows are produced by belmont media center thanks for being michael moderator roger thanks for asking me and happy really st patrick's yes voters will decide who fills the five year welcome both of you tonight here tonight the purpose of this debate is to help voters decide who to vote for people nd and to get to know the candidates roger is going to tell everyone what does it mean to be a housing authority board member briefly go roger sure that the belmont housing authority manages housing units that provide a place to live for low income families in belmont the housing authority also serves veterans and serves the elderly  housing authority is really one of the largest landlords in the community of belmont it currently manages three separate developments consisting of veterans village with one hundred units waverley oaks with seventy four units and sherman gardens with eighty one units the housing authority also manages a variety of rental vouchers in certificates the authority has five members four of those members are elected and one of those members is appointed by the state and one of the four members will be one of our two candidates sitting here yes yes now it's time for each candidate to make their opening statement you have two minutes or less and we're going to start with cassandra lucky me so my name is sorry my name is co founder paige i am a tenant in the belmont village one of three developments in town that are for low income families as well as like roger said the elderly and the disabled and the trends of course i've been there for thirty years and i i grew up there as a child and not spend something that's been very difficult for me to express to the general public because we live in such a prestigious town with an amazing school system but i would not be here if it were not for the low income housing that is offered through this town my children would not be able to be here i am now back in belmont living in the village i am there with my own three children and they are fortunate enough to be here with me on this journey being able to get the right education and the reason why i stepped up into this position was to help the tenan understand you know that we don't have to be afraid of where we come from we don't have to be ashamed anymore and we have a voice so that's why i'm here thank you cassandra  authority as roger said manages three properties and it's a fiduciary responsibility for the commonwealth as well as for belmont we need to make sure that the monies that we get since our funding comes from d h cd the commonwealth and not from belmont we need to make sure that that money is properly spent i have always had an interest in seniors i serve on the council on aging i would say that we of our two hundred and fifty six dollars units more than half of them are for seniors  but i'm also interested in delma village i'm very interested in seeing that the children who live in belmont village get a good education and i initiated before our former director left  executive director left i initiated the little libraries which i saw around town everywhere else and i thought this would be a good thing to have at at the housing authority to encourage the kids of attempted to have some conversations with the library about having a reading class and and doing some other things with the public schools however just to  reiterate we are primarily that is the bell does indicate time is up already but you can you can finish with your closing statement if you have an opportunity to do that and i do want to point out that we do have this little bell it is our timekeepers bell alison coulton has volunteered to be our time keeper tonight that's roger's daughter and i want to thank her and she is basically it's important so that we can stay on schedule roger you actually have my list of questions so you well someone ok thank you but i don't have yeah so i'm going to have roger ask the st question go ahead roger and you have so you have one minute to answer the question and then you have one minute if you want to rebut what your opponent says if you if you have a rebuttal you have one minute so we'll start one of the important issues between the housing authority commission the housing authority board in the housing authority comments is the issue of communications and what i would like to ask is what are the issues that are most important to improve communications about and why are those issues in your best served face to face i also believe that sometimes that can be difficult expression with all of the changes that have happened within the authority lately both in the office also maintenance were about to lose somebody who's been there forever as far back as i can remember and now we have a new office staff the board only changes every five years so yes we do have a little bit of familial laverty with that and that is very important but we need to be able to trust each other and speak to each other openly and i don't believe that that's something that's going on with all the new changes i don't think that that is something that we as pundits feel comfortable doing and i think that means to change ok can i call you tony you know to my ok i think it's under raises a good point i think there needs to be more open dialogue i think one thing that the board has talked about that just to be clear  in the time that i've been there we we said goodbye to an old executive director and had a very thorough and and painstaking process to bring in a new executive director and we've done a lot of other things and certainly communication should be our top priority one of the things we have talked about i know we're going to have a website and i i believe there will be  there had been another two tenants who had come to some of our executive meetings and they had talked about a newsletter there is funding for attendance association  certainly a newsletter whether it's online or paper would probably be better on line that would be one way of communicating ideas i do think however we should encourage more meetings with and we do have a meeting every every month the bill went off there do you have anything  i mean one thing that i've learned in this experience is that tommy and i seem to think alike and we share the same opinion and the fact that we do care about the residents however the residents are not confident in the people that are above them right now in the office or the board because they don't have enough knowledge and that's because they're not expressing concern to join and to want that they've lost their sense of caring they don't want to be involved and that's a big issue we need them to want to be involved so that we can communicate efficiently and so that everybody is on the same page nothing changes if nothing changes you need to speak up for yourself i think you know i'm an ass next question what is the physical condition of the belmont housing authority units and what might you do as a member of the housing authority facility we have as you might remember town meeting stepped in and and paid for electrical upgrades to belmont village i remember because i remember the argument and i remember standing up and saying you know these are our neighbors we need to make sure that they have proper funding but what can we do we do have we're doing roofs right now in belmont village  i remember we are one thing i actually reached out to roger about is some of cassandra's concerns were draft enos and while we have a long range plan for windows i thought perhaps we should could bring in mass saver whoever roger thinks i see a little more connection between the town the town services and what we need at the housing  cassandra mare respond to that st or after you for it so i don't forget you bring up a great point tommy about massive coming in it's actually something that i had attempted to do in the past we do qualify for those services and i went to the office staff and i requested that we be able to do that and they told me that because it's not a paid service that we were not allowed to have somebody come in and make changes to the home was kind of confusing as you can see that would be very confusing because this is something that would benefit greatly it would be really we're responsible tenants are responsible for the heating the electric bill the new electrical system you know you say only a couple people have gone to these board meetings there's two hundred and fifty six dollars residents plus their families so two people having an opinion on something is not enough and we need we need to change that and we need to fix that because these electrical systems are horrendous you know what about the physical condition of the units and what you would do as a board member  physical conditions of the units we've got a number of problems ranging from the elderly and disabled units having problems with railings not having appropriate  accessibility into different areas which is being worked on there as a project coming up to work on those things and as far as the family unit goes there is a lot of mauled in some of the units in the time that i have been there i know several units who all have had walls come down destroy their bad all different things from the mall to not just outside but inside the traffic on the doors you know simple weather stripping would would do  and it's been something that's been an argument between the tenants and maintenance they say they say that the office won't pay for the office says we never said that and it just doesn't get done anything else the windows the windows definitely are a problem but i know that that's an upcoming project as well and that's going to take a lot of time ok that question last question is a good lead in to my question what role in your opinion does the housing authority commission or the housing authority board have been overseeing hopefully you understood you dude the commissioner's responsibility is one to oversee the management staff ok through policies i'm not a big policy person however you do have to develop policies and also come up with management come up with ways of of overseeing what your management staff is doing now you have to do that in a in a delicate way because you certainly don't want to alienate your management and we have a new management within the past year and a half the nd piece that is our responsibility and i can tell you since i've been there is our fiduciary responsibility for maintaining the budget making sure that the budget is allocated properly and it's it's for basically for the commonwealth i mean because that's who we're who owns these buildings think tom it was a great point there is a lot of funding that goes into this and a lot of different channels that you have to go through in order to get things approved whether it's maintenance or office staff and i think that when there a board meetings it's a great opportunity for the board to learn what is going on in the day to day life and my my fear is that the tenants are not being forthcoming and they're not participating enough with the director or with the board to let them know what it is that's actually going on so i feel like from the bottom to the top it's not clear and it's not concise so i don't think that everything is coming so it's kind of hard to manage something that you don't know when you don't understand and that's something that i would like to bring because i already have a relationship with a lot of the tenants i've lived there for thirty years and they know me and they trust me  there have been some political reasons why it's not been done before this but i'd say whoever of us when doesn't win and whoever of us doesn't win i would like to see that one of us becomes that tenet liaison to work with the people in the in the authority and i know you live there a long time but i've i think i've been pretty visible what can be done to help residents stop fearing retaliation and more comfortable reporting a problem they're having with their unit sondra so the approach that i would take is to reach out to them and create a system where instead of being labeled as a name or an apartment number we could come in as a list that i could have where i know who is what number on that list and maybe the office doesn't maybe the board members the other board members don't know now why can't you we can't know the name of the person but the office of the office can know and that's a lot of the fairest stemming from having a new office in there and not understanding or knowing who these people are you know they're not comfortable talking to them and we've been trained for many years to bring the work order and and their maintenance will come into your  some of them are qualified and some of them are not and problems get fixed and i'm not the most adequate way and it has to be redone over and over again and  know we have the work order system i you know i talked about this issue of retaliation with several people and you know i'm sure there are people who feel it's possible that they can be retaliated against but i i you know i'm happy to come up with a new or system i'm happy to look at a new system and we do need to we need to remove that fear and we do need to train the maintenance staff and the office to be on the same page because repairs are not getting made the way that they should be and tenants are getting blamed for things that they have not actually donna don't have the full responsibility for but we have had we ha three maintenance people for three units and over that needs to be increased yet again we're dealing with the budget you made an observation that this is a very big budget it's really not when you look at what the revenues are and what you need for maintenance we have three people wanted a half over about a year we've only we've been down to one is definitely becoming more of a debate now  it's very good it's very good but you have to move on to the next question go ahead i'd like to drill down a little bit rather than speaking in generalities to each of you  two examples of things either good or bad that you have personally heard from chemists in the past year or two and tell us whether those were communicate  to the commission and if so how that communication with whether you thought the complete communication was satisfactory or not satisfactory sense on the new management took all of our is that they're having a hard time with problems in their unit for one the moment being blamed for something in their unit that might have caused the smalled or the drafts and also the other complaint that i've heard above all with everybody is that they don't trust the new staff and part of that is because of the title on the end of her name and that would be asked why so she's an attorney now none of us like change change is something that's very difficult to come into but the biggest problem that they had is that we weren't properly introduced to we nobody knew who she was when she came and everybody mad her as they went in for different things in the office and everything got changed all of a sudden and people weren't used to that policies were put in place so that they didn't actually follow through with it and now they are being followed through with the new management that that's definitely part of part of the difficulty is that things were a little looser in the prior management and now things are tightening up i think the board could've had maybe a party or something but i was under the impression that she went to each but it might have been nice for the board to  to have reached out to each property i just wasn't aware that it wasn't being done that way as far as the mold and the drafts were you know we keep talking about those things and i have reached out to the health department to help us resolve the mold obviously i can't do anything it's like when i reached out to roger bout some other ideas and in energy conservation for the drafts i can make i can put people together but ultimately i need the director to go and i would be going and sitting with her or another member of the board i think they have time for one more question but we really have to stand schedule say of time here closing statements what do you see the future of sherman gardens to be and what role should tenants have in deciding what the future is start with the plan future of sherman gardens there is definitely potential there they've got the space it could be a beautiful beautiful place and i think that there's room to expand and maybe offer some more units and some of those units could actually come from because they will be handicapped accessible they could come from the family developments that we have we have a few tenants who right now require will chair ramp but we have shared  ways and that becomes troublesome to other residents that are using that especially for shoveling and stuff like that if we could bring some of those families up and have like two bedrooms or something add a couple of units there that are two bedrooms to bring these families over so that they have more adequate living space than what the family of veterans is designed as we would also open up more units for other families to come in that we really need it tommy sh gardens has is the is identified received funding for developing a plan it's a bit of a way off but certainly one of the big things we want to have there is an elevator building because we have no elevator buildings and there are people who are handicapped and you do need to need that service it is a big property so there's a lot of things i know i attended a couple plays i think there was an architectural design program at few of the architectural schools  and that's been they've come in and spoken to the board about different but your question was what should the what should the residents and i did here i did hear from the residents that yes they bought and now it's time for closing statements because you go st to one minute ok so again i'm not doing this for any other reason other than to help the residents get their voice out make sure that they do have a part in a decision in making sure that there is good communication skills with the office without that fear and if tenants are going to be fearful then i would like to try to be can bring those issues to the board and to the office without having the tenants think that there's going to be any kind of retaliation and there has been retaliation in the past as little or trivial as that may seem to  outside it means a lot to the people that live there and it's caused a lot of other things to fail i e work orders obeying policies getting to know the board getting to know the office those things are not there because there's no trust there and we need to rebuild that i think i have always been involved in in the town and i think i think very clearly about practical solutions because sonders through this entire time has been alleging that people are fearful of retaliation i haven't heard it maybe i'm too far distant from it certainly will be asking the question of the people that i know who live in the other units i'm also concerned with you know upgrading the facilities and you know making sure that that the community of people who live in the housing authority feels like they're part of belmont so i i would like to continue as a commissioner because i think there's a lot of a lot that i can bring to the table in terms of working with the town and my experience thank you tony thank you i want to thank everyone for tuning in to this live debate please get out and vote you got to know the two housing authority candidates tonight the election is april nd be sure to get out and vote thank you