By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Hutchinson City Council was presented with the larger issue of not having a local, functioning housing authority as it considered an agreement with the Newton Housing Authority to administer the Section 8 Tenant Protection Vouchers for the North Park Village residents who wish to stay there rather than move to the Commerce Gardens II development.
"In my car, I have the applications and the certification packets," said Jolynn Colberg, Executive Director with the Newton Housing Authority. "I'm going to go, if you agree with this, I will go deliver them to them and start the process. They'd like to see it done by July 31st. We'll probably try really hard to get that done. It will just take a lot of weekends between now and then."
When the Cowley County Housing Authority backed out of wanting to handle the vouchers, only Newton, Wichita, Manhattan and Dodge City were left as options.
"The repositioning is very complicated and there's a lot of different ways to go," Colberg said. "I've spent the last probably five years studying it, because Newton will reposition, probably about two years down the road."
Council member Jon Daveline asked Colberg what happened in Hutchinson to cause the lack of a local resource.
"Originally, I was started from Manhattan," Colberg said. "I moved to Newton to take this position to be closer to my mother. We just couldn't get Hutchinson Housing Authority to answer any phone calls or do any landlord references, then slowly, we just couldn't even contact them. The smaller housing authorities are struggling, first of all, to find staff. It's a very detailed, long hours, always something to do job. It's hard to find anybody to take executive director's positions. There's a lot of knowledge involved. The smaller towns are really struggling. I've seen it all over the state of Kansas. A lot of cities have had to actually take back the housing authorities and are trying to operate them themselves, because there is not enough funding to staff it adequately."
Colberg said that is because the amount of funding coming down from HUD is unpredictable and even her office can only serve the city limits of Newton. There are no vouchers for Harvey County in their office as those are in Wichita. Manhattan, for example, has Morris County. McPherson County has to go to Cowley County for its vouchers.
"They set aside 100 percent of the funds, but they never fund us fully," Colberg said. "Sometimes it's 76%, sometimes it's 80%, 82%, you know, we never know."
Mayor Steve Garza asked City Attorney Paul Brown about bringing things back in house. Brown said the section of city code is still there if that's a decision the governing body wants to make, but they did not take action on the larger issue Tuesday.