THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 12, 1997 TAG: 9701140444
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY NANCY LEWIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 69 lines
The city's housing authority has proposed several changes to its controversial plan mandating community service for public-housing tenants.
Commissioners are scheduled to vote Monday on the proposed social lease, which includes community service.
Revisions would exempt employed residents from having to perform 20 hours a year of volunteer work.
The proposal also no longer says that community service will be ``required'' for other tenants; the new wording says those residents will ``agree to contribute'' the 20 hours a year.
The potential impact on tenants was still not clear, and housing officials declined to elaborate Friday.
Another change says, ``Tenants will not be evicted solely on the basis'' of refusal to cooperate; instead, they will receive counseling or mediation.
The Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority and some tenant leaders have been at odds over the social lease since the agency proposed it in October.
Agency officials say they proposed community service to help tenants ``improve the social and economic state of their lives.''
Tenants said they favored more volunteerism but opposed the idea of making it mandatory, likening it to slavery.
Tenant leaders said Friday the changes in the proposal amounted to a play on words.
`` `Agree' is the same as `require' if you sign that contract,'' said Audrey Terry, bookkeeper for Diggs Town Tenant Management Corp. and a resident of the public housing community.
``There's no compromise,'' said Arlene Barber, president of the tenants group. ``They still think we're the ill-schooled women that they can change the wording on.''
The revisions to the proposal are contained in a two-page document that was handed to leaders of the communities on Thursday by Ray Strutton, administrator for the authority.
The alterations came on the heels of a rare outpouring of response from people who live in the city's 11 public housing communities. Commissioners had requested that they be provided a summary of responses before Monday.
Barber, president of the Diggs Town Tenant Management Corp., said Friday that she had delivered petitions objecting to the implementation of the social lease that were signed by at least 600 residents of Diggs Town and Roberts Village to NRHA offices before Dec. 27. She says she has receipts to prove it, as well as copies of the petitions.
Barber also said that housing officials have in hand 123 individually signed letters from Diggs Town residents detailing their objections.
But Andrea Bear, assistant executive director for the NRHA, would not confirm that the authority had received the petitions. ``Nobody can get 600 signatures from public housing residents,'' she said. ``We can't even get them to come to meetings.''
Strutton, the NRHA administrator, informed housing authority commissioners this week that he had received 17 written responses, about a dozen of them negative and the rest positive, according to Commissioner Joshua Paige.
Strutton said Friday he had not included petitioners in his summation because no one in his office had counted them or verified that they were Norfolk citizens. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
MEETING
The Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board of
Commissioners is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Monday in the NRHA
assembly room, 12th floor of 201 Granby St.