Accompanied by aides who are negotiating to avert a federal seizure of the Chicago Housing Authority, Mayor Harold Washington Saturday criticized the U.S. housing official who will decide whether a hostile takeover of the agency is necessary.
Less than 14 hours after city and CHA representatives left the bargaining table in Washington without reaching an agreement on the management of the financially troubled agency, the mayor publicly attacked the official for suggesting that a solution was near.
Throughout the day, the mayor criticized James Baugh, the chief negotiator for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, accusing him of acting in ”bad faith” because he held a press conference halfway through a daylong negotiating session Friday.
Baugh had met with reporters to announce that agreement had been reached on a method for selecting a private management team to run the CHA`s day-to-day operations, but that key issues remained to be resolved.
”To come out in the middle of a negotiating session to talk to the press is invariably wrong,” Washington said during a call-in radio show on WGCI-FM. ”You don`t come out and say we`ve solved this or solved that until you have an agreement on the whole package. There is no deal.”
Federal officials, who have been trying to pressure Mayor Washington to hand over day-to-day control of the housing authority to a private management team to be controlled by HUD, have threatened to seize the CHA unilaterally unless an agreement is reached by Monday.
Monday was set as the deadline because that is when U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Aspen is scheduled to place the CHA`s bankrupt scattered-site housing construction program in receivership.
But a source close to the negotiations indicated that Aspen could postpone his ruling ”for 24 or 48 hours” if federal-city negotiations were still underway.
Although HUD officials were willing to negotiate through the weekend, city representatives told them they would not return to the talks until Monday.
On Friday, and again Saturday, the city negotiators` efforts were undercut by the splashy, antagonistic public-relations campaign by the mayor and his aides, which was aimed at riling up CHA residents and other Chicagoans to oppose actively a federal takeover of the nation`s second-largest housing authority.
In that campaign, Washington has enlisted such diverse figures as U.S. Sen. Paul Simon (D., Ill.), East St. Louis Mayor Carl Officer and Ald. Richard Mell (33d), a former council opponent. He has tried to define the struggle as a David-and-Goliath battle, with himself and Chicago as David.
On Friday, the mayor said the primary issue in the negotiations was who would be responsible for running the city`s public housing, HUD or the CHA board.
”The board must manage,” he said. ”Everything else hinges on that.”
But on Saturday, the mayor tried to play down the fact that the CHA and, in turn, his administration, were fighting to keep control of the housing authority, including its jobs and contracts.
Instead, he insisted that the primary impasse between the CHA and HUD was the level of funding that the federal agency provided the authority to upgrade the city`s public housing.
He accused the Reagan administration and HUD of being insensitive to public-housing residents and miserly with funds needed to maintain the CHA developments. As a result, he said, ”maintenance is deferred, giving the impression that the housing authority is guilty of mismanagement.”
”The issue is money, money, money,” Washington said on the radio show. He continued the theme at Operaton PUSH`s weekly meeting, saying, ”The issue is not control. The issue is not patronage. The issue is not who (will) be boss.
”You have to have money to buy people and plaster to keep the buildings up. It`s not bad management. It`s neglect on the part of HUD.
”There`s a policy in this country that demands you take care of public housing,” the mayor said. ”You (HUD) have reneged on that commitment.”
HUD officials have skirted the issue of how much federal money they are willing to give the CHA. But they are adamant about not giving funds to an authority that has historically mismanaged its affairs.
”I don`t think anyone would encourage us to give money to an authority when we have doubts about its management capacity,” said Baugh, acting assistant HUD secretary for public housing. ”If we were directly involved in selecting the CHA`s management team that would give us the kind of controls we want, we would provide the funding to the extent we possibly could, given our resources.”
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By attacking HUD, the mayor is trying to divert attention from his own responsibility for the housing authority`s problems during much of his mayoral term.
He is also working to paint himself–rather than the 145,000 CHA residents–as the victim in the dispute. Although he might lose the battle over the housing authority, he could end up the big winner, locally and nationally, by casting himself as a feisty Democratic mayor standing up to the pushy Republican national administration.
Such political considerations are not new in connection with the CHA, and it was to eliminate political motives from the housing authority`s operations that HUD began two months ago to pressure the mayor and the CHA board to relinquish daily control of the agency.
Despite the mayor`s attempts to play down the control issue Saturday, the central issue in the negotiations remains the question of how much power the CHA board–and, through the board, the mayor–will have over the operations, jobs and contracts of the CHA.
Baugh said Friday: ”We intend to be involved and have hands on. We will be in control.”
On the other hand, Ernest Barefield, Mayor Washington`s chief of staff, said Saturday: ”We`re concerned about setting up an environment in which the CHA board and whoever the new CHA management is can act as effective management under the law. We also have significant concerns that HUD doesn`t continue its practice of interfering with the ability of CHA management and the board to execute its own program.”
While negotiations are in abeyance, both sides are preparing for a possible HUD takeover.
A team of federal housing management experts has been assembled to run the CHA if HUD carries out its threat to seize the housing authority, according to a federal source.
That seizure would be based on a federal declaration that the CHA is in breach of its annual funding contract with HUD, and, over the weekend, federal lawyers were drafting the legal papers necessary for such a declaration.
At the CHA, General Counsel James Thomas sent a memo to top-level managers telling them how to act if HUD officials attempted a takeover.
”Staff should not surrender possession of any file or record unless the requestor has a court order or subpoena,” wrote Thomas, who has said the agency would go to court to fight a takeover.
Despite HUD threats to seize the CHA, it has been clear since the dispute began that federal officials would rather have city officials agree voluntarily to a private management team.
”The breach (of contract) is obviously something that we always have,”
Baugh said. ”It seems to me that, if we can work out and move ahead in the direction we`re moving now, it does not become necessary.
”But we`re not finished. We`ve got some more work to do.”