Housing Authority Board Member Lois Jones Claims Agency Is Biased

A Homestead Housing Authority board member claims officials are biased toward hiring Mexicans. But the nationalities of new hires there are not all known

By Christina Veiga

cveiga@MiamiHerald.com

A Homestead Housing Authority board member claims biased hiring and firings have taken place at the federally funded agency.

Board Member Lois Jones claims as much in a letter to the NAACP, the State Attorney’s Office and other local and state agencies. She claims housing authority officials want to hire more Mexican employees, and are firing non-Mexican employees.

Housing Authority Executive Director Oscar Hentschel and the majority of board members are of Mexican heritage.

Hentschel, who has led the troubled agency for about a year, did not return an email for comment. But he has addressed the issue, which has come up before, in a previous letter to one of the authority’s funding agencies, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“All employees that were terminated were dismissed with a valid cause,” he wrote.

He called Jones’ allegations “unfounded.”

Four employees have been fired since Hentschel joined the authority, which is tasked with providing housing assistance for farm workers and low-income tenants.

Two of those fired were Puerto Rican, one was Argentinian and another was black, according to the employees.

Four have been hired since Hentschel joined the authority. Their ethnic backgrounds are not known, although one of the new hires’ application says he went to school in Cuba. Another new hire, Christopher Orama, said he was born in Peru, after his family fled from Cuba.

Reached by phone Tuesday, Orama said his nationality was not a factor in his interview for his position as a maintenance man.

“That never came up,” he said.

Three of the employees fired had no negative job performance evaluations prior to being fired, according to their personnel records. The performance reviews of the fourth employee, Monica Rusconi, are not known because her personnel file is missing.

Jeanette Torres, a six-year employee was fired because her “work habits and production has fallen severely below the appropriate standards,” according to a termination letter. Torres said she is Puerto Rican.

Torres marked files as having been completed, when in fact they were not, according to the letter.

“We were working on them. It’s not like the files were not going to be finished,” Torres said.

But Torres said the bigger issue is that she was denied unemployment benefits after she says the executive director’s assistant, Brandy Ramirez, lied during a hearing.

Torres said she was blamed by Ramirez for the findings in a November report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA in part funds the housing authority’s $20 million budget, and recently blasted Homestead in a report for allowing its properties to deteriorate while employees were given cushy benefits.

One of the report’s finding was that the housing authority was not following the protocol for assigning rental assistance, and therefore some of the neediest renters went without help.

Torres said that in her position, she was not responsible for assigning rental assistance.

The Housing Authority did not immediately provide Torres’ title or job description for this report.

Ramirez did not return an email for comment.

Eudalia Bermudez, a six-year veteran, was the next to be fired. She also is Puerto Rican.

She was given the boot because she worked on files of her daughter, according to a letter by Hentschel. Bermudez’s daughter receives Section 8 housing vouchers from the federal government, which the authority manages.

Bermudez said she did not assign any benefits to her daughter that she wasn’t entitled to under Section 8 rules.

Robert Simmons worked longest for the authority — 30 years. He is black.

He was fired because he took copper wire out of an authority building that was going to be demolished. Copper prices have been high lately and the metal can be resold.

But Simmons said he was given permission to remove the copper, and that other employees did the same, according to Jones’ letter. The others were not fired, according to Jones.

He has also been denied unemployment benefits. Simmons was living in a housing authority property, but has been evicted, he said. He is now homeless, Jones wrote.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/10/2740961/board-member-says-homestead-housing.html#storylink=cpy