Crescent Springs voted to table the discussion on allowing the Housing Authority of Covington to administer the city’s housing choice voucher program at the city’s March 25 council meeting.
Housing choice vouchers are more commonly known as Section 8 vouchers. They provide full or partial rent help for qualified people seeking housing on the private market. They are funded with federal dollars.
The Housing Authority of Covington, which will soon be responsible for administering Section 8 housing in all of Kenton County, has made agreements with cities in the Northern Kentucky area in the past, but Crescent Springs is questioning making a change to this.
The city of Covington began the process of merging its voucher program with the Housing Authority of Covington last year. Previously, other cities had made agreements with the city to allow Covington to manage vouchers throughout the county, which is an unusual arrangement in that housing voucher programs throughout the country are usually run at the county level. The previous agreement between Covington and the other Kenton County cities took place in the 1980s.
At the meeting, an order was read that would enter Cresent Springs into a similar agreement. After much discussion, the council decided to table the vote for a month to allow for further research.
When cities become part of this agreement with the authority, the landlords within them can choose to participate in the program or not. Council member Brain Barclay is also a landlord and has personal experience to include in the discussion.
“It is a business decision for somebody like me or another landlord, private landlord, to enter into the program,” Barclay said. “There are a couple of things about it that I don’t like, there’s not a whole lot of landlord remediation if anything goes awry. So, it was a business decision for me not to enter into it.”
Despite Barclay’s personal decision not to be a part of the program, he does feel that the city needs to come to an agreement on the matter.
“The fact of the matter is that in the city of Crescent Springs, 66 houses are ready, or 66 units are ready,” Barclay said. “By not entering or not renewing or not coming to an agreement on this, that program… in Crescent Springs, ends. Those 66 families are then displaced. That is not something, at this point, that I would be in favor of.”
The council agreed to prepare a list of questions to discuss with the authority and to revisit the municipal order at next month’s city council meeting. If Crescent Springs decides to vote against the agreement, then the city would either need to set up its own housing authority to administer the federal funds or let the agreement expire, which would enable landlords the ability to begin evictions in the absence of federal payments.
