Dear Residents,

This letter is addressed to the many residents we have heard from in Council districts 2 and 5 who are neighbors of OHA "scattered site" housing. Through your participation in NCPC meetings and through emails to us, your Councilmembers, we have clearly heard your concerns and frustration with lack of building maintenance and lack of control over tenant behavior at numerous OHA properties. We also understand that despite your many complaints to OHA about conditions at specific properties, many problems have gone unaddressed, or have been addressed ineffectively.

In an effort to improve the responsiveness of OHA to your concerns, our two Council offices sat down last week with the management staff of OHA: Jon Gresley, Executive Director of the Oakland Housing Authority (OHA), Roderick Roche, Director of Facilities Management, Carel Duplessis, Chief of Police for OHA, and Patricia Ison, Director of Resident and Community Services.

The intent of the meeting was to develop approaches that will result in more effective communication with OHA, as well as improved response time and accountability by OHA, to community complaints regarding conditions at scattered-site housing of the Oakland Housing Authority.

There were three important outcomes of the meeting we would like to share with the community to get further feedback, which we hope will result in improved communication, better appearance and security at OHA properties.

1. Communication and Accountability. We agreed on a set of procedures which, once implemented, will likely result in greater community access to OHA personnel and to greater accountability in the management and maintenance of scattered-site OHA properties. It is clear that a major problem for the community in dealing with OHA on many issues is not having a single point of contact to hold accountable on any given issue, and not having clarity on the processes and procedures in getting results. To remedy this, OHA agreed to the following:

· To place on every scattered site a phone number and e-mail address to contact for any concerns. This phone number will connect the caller with a new Customer Service Representative who will log in a record of each call and route information to the appropriate person. This Customer Service Center will track complaints and the Representative will be prepared to give callers a real time update on their complaints.

· To provide to each caller a description of the process which OHA will employ to achieve the desired result, and ideally a timeline for achieving these results.

· To develop a brochure which will be given out at Neighborhood Crime Prevention Councils (NCPC's) and other community meetings that lists the names and titles of the primary people responsible in any given area. At this time, until the Customer Service number is set up and distributed, which should be within the next three weeks, callers with concerns about OHA properties should call 874-1632. This is the general complaint line and it will remain available for callers after the Customer Service number is added. Callers can leave a recorded message including a phone number where they can be contacted for follow-up and clarification. The call will be logged and passed to the appropriate person working for Chief Duplessis (security), Director Roche (maintenance), and Patricia Ison (resident and community services). These three individuals will be responsible for follow-through on complaints under their respective jurisdiction. Emergency crime-related calls should be made to 911. If people wish to make a direct contact, for non-emergency crime reports, calls should be made to 535-3100.

· Mr. Gresley has agreed to have staff attend the City of Oakland's Service Delivery System (SDS) meetings, as well as NCPC meetings when OHA items are on the agenda.

· OHA will be undergoing some restructuring to have more decentralized decision makers available to work closer to the community. The council offices encouraged OHA to consider restructuring in a way that allows them to duplicate the 6 PSA structure of the city so that they may take advantage of building relationships with the appropriate PSA lieutenant, building services supervisor, etc.

We hope that by having OHA staff be more available to community residents, by more clearly articulating next steps, and by achieving greater accountability mechanisms, the turnaround time for responding and remedying complaints will be shortened, and problems will be dealt with quickly.

2. Property Maintenance. OHA has agreed to seek the funds to paint and rehabilitate from 3-5 additional OHA scattered site properties per council district within the next 1-2 years. They will work with the council office and the community to identify these sites and to ensure the sites identified as most in-need are addressed first. We will be in contact with the you, the community, about this in the near future through both e-mail and participation in NCPC meetings.

3. Tenant Behavior. OHA has agreed to continue to strengthen their working relationship with the City's police department, the Public Nuisance Case Manager, Neighborhood Law Corps, and the respective council office to have greater and faster success in situations when evictions are the only remedy. The Authority and the City will cooperate in seeking the eviction of those engaged in illegal activities. On non-criminal issues, OHA is also planning to add an "Intervention team" that will consist of the manager, a police officer and a community service worker. The team will meet with problematic tenants to offer their services to assist in resolving complaints from neighbors concerning behavior, to avoid the necessity of the eviction process, when possible. This seems to make a lot of sense, and we support it, as long as there are some positive results in the relative short term when these efforts are employed.

We invite everyone to keep in mind that these proposed solutions must be given some time to work, though they should be employed immediately. We invite both positive and negative feedback from residents to our council office to keep us abreast of the results.

We invite all concerned residents of Police Service Areas 3 and 4 to come to a meeting, hosted by 18Y NCPC, scheduled for September 29th at 6:30 PM at a location still to be determined to give the City and the Oakland Housing Authority feedback on the proposed changes in this letter.

Thank you for all you do to improve your neighborhoods. We look forward to seeing tangible results from the agreements we reached with the management of the Housing Authority.

Sincerely,

Ignacio De La Fuente
President, Oakland City Council

Pat Kernighan
Councilmember, District 2