Cara Clifford is 10 months into leadership of the Northampton Housing Authority and soon faces her first performance review. Last week, errors she made at the outset came back to haunt her anew, when a state agency faulted her handling of personnel matters.
Clifford will have a lot to reflect upon at review time – and so will members of the authority’s board, which comes in for a drubbing of its own from the Civil Service Commission.
While its decision raps changes Clifford enacted last summer, this isn’t footnote stuff. By ordering that a top staffer be restored to his post with back pay, the decision complicates Clifford’s oversight of a place that provides a vital service to its stakeholders: tenants in 618 subsidized apartments and the 1,200 people who receive Section 8 subsidies for private housing. The authority operates on a $1.4 million administrative budget and manages $9.5 million in outside housing expenses a year.
A lot rides on this place, and that’s why Clifford is paid $105,000 a year. How she handles this setback will say a lot about what she’s learned since arriving in this important job July 7.
State law requires that public employees possess the right skills when hired. And before being fired, they must be treated fairly. These laws, Chapter 31 and the separate Personnel Administration Rules, protect professional staff within public agencies from the whims of politics and patronage. When public employees feel they’ve been wronged, they can turn for help to the Civil Service Commission.
That’s what two employees of the authority, Michael Owens and David Adamson, did after Clifford fired them. Last week, after hearings, legal briefs and months of deliberation, the commission returned with the 27-page decision that Owens was shown the door without due process, “contrary to the letter and spirit of the statute,” in moves the panel’s chairman, Christopher C. Bowman, likened to a “purge.”
Adamson’s case is pending, but it is hard to imagine the finding will be much different.
It is not news Clifford got off to a rocky start when she replaced long-time director Jonathan Hite. It is news that it continues to have ramifications. She and the authority’s board violated the Open Meeting Law by entering without notice into executive session Aug. 10, when she proposed an administrative reorganization. They talked about who would be fired, but these employees were not given proper notice or rights under state law, the commission determined. Owens must be rehired, it said, rejoining a team from which he was summarily dismissed.
The commission’s decision offers the most detailed account to date of how this played out. It isn’t a pretty picture. Clifford had been given a copy of the authority’s personnel rules when she started work. Those rules clearly state that any housing authority employee with five uninterrupted years on the job cannot be “involuntarily separated … without the protection of a hearing.” She nonetheless treated Owens and Adamson as “at-will” employees with no rights to due process.
According to the decision, Clifford told Owens at their first meeting that she wanted to hire a deputy director and had someone else in mind for it – a colleague from her prior company in Connecticut. She also told Owens, the director of administration and finance, to transfer all his duties to subordinates, only do work she assigned him directly and – in a bizarre command that surely got Owens’ attention – not to leave the building without her permission.
That new deputy director’s job was posted July 20 and filled Aug. 15, three days after Clifford told Owens that the job he’d held since 2008 had been eliminated. He was escorted out with a promise of two weeks pay. Nine days later, it became a paid leave but the commission didn’t buy it. By choosing to preside over the required hearing she’d first denied Owens, Clifford was going through the motions, the panel found, and his termination was “never in doubt.”
Clifford erred, and so did the authority board, which rubber-stamped her reorganization plan without taking time to review it. Members may have expected a shakeup, since Clifford told the state commission that she found low morale among authority employees and poor customer service.
It is important to note that her attention to these matters has won her deserved praise from tenants. But when Clifford rolled out the reorganization, she stumbled – and badly. She arrived at a board meeting, in an executive session later found to be unlawful, with just one copy of an 11-page restructuring plan. At an open board session Aug. 31, one member said he had not seen the plan; another asked for more time to review it. Despite that, the board approved it. Other actions by Clifford along the way put employees in a “no-win” situation or were “contrived” and “disingenuous,” the commission said.
Is “purge” too strong a term for what Clifford did? We think it is. Clifford arrived from the private sector with a reformer’s zeal, but ill-prepared to operate under the laws that govern management of a quasi-public housing authority. Mayor David J. Narkewicz, who appoints four of the five members of the authority board, must see to it this panel properly guides the modernization underway.
Now, rather than trimming expenses, Clifford’s personnel shifts will cost the authority money. If upheld, Adamson’s appeal adds to that cost. For months to come, rather than steering the authority to improved tenant service, the director and her board must fix problems of their own making.