It is an open secret among tenants that BMHA Executive Sharon West & tenant-elected Commissioner Mary Rogers “do dinner” every Sunday. It would usually be considered a conflict-of-interest for an elected tenant representative to be so cozy with ‘management’. But after being a Municipal Housing Authority Commissioner for nearly 20 years, & a BMHA tenant for over 35 years, the usual rules don’t apply to Mary Rogers. Nor to Sharon West.

Public housing, with predominantly black families, is widely known to work like a ’federal plantation’, complete with ‘house slaves’ & ‘field slaves’. Add generous funding, coupled with lax supervision provided by corrupt & wasteful US Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), and public housing becomes a lucrative “poverty industry”. Add the virtual demise of the civil rights movement, & predominantly black tenants become tokens in a cynical charade of “housing the poor” while making politicians, developers & ‘civil rights bureaucrats’ rich . . all at incredible cost to taxpayers, as most urban poor get little or nothing, while living in squalid housing in dangerous neighborhoods.

The ‘plantation’ is deeply corrupting . . . because black (or Hispanic) tenants are persuaded by staff who “look like us” that skin color (or ‘color of ethnicity’) . . . not “content of character” (proposed by ML King to be the measure of human worth) .. make them trustworthy. It went so far as to have staff speak to Hispanics at West Side Lakeview Homes in Spanish to overcome resistance by English-speaking whites & blacks to the costly $105 million HOPE VI bonanza that will make connected (to Clinton, having ‘Coffee in the White House’ in 1995) Phila. developer Israel Roizman very rich. While HOPE VI builds flimsy apartments for the poor costing up to $1/4 million each in a neighborhood having the lowest rate of home ownership in Buffalo.

The $800 Dinner

Apparently Mary Rogers goes grocery shopping on Saturdays to prepare whatever dish Sharon West fancies on Sunday. On a Saturday last August Rogers asked Kenfield resident Carol Kelley, the program director Rogers had hired for the new Martha Mitchell Community Center to drive her in the BMHA van to shop at Galleria Mall. Being insecure driving in unfamiliar suburbs, Kelley asked a friend to drive the van. The friend backed into another car at one of several stops. Rogers immediately asked Kelley to say she was driving so BMHA insurance would apply. But for some reason, obviously known to both West & Rogers, it didn’t. So the fiscally mismanaged RCC, (Resident Council Corporation, which pays staff at Mitchell Community Center) totally controlled by Mary Rogers, secretly paid the $799.20 bill (8/9/01) for damages instead.

The menu for Sunday’s dinner is unknown, but it cost taxpayers $800. . plus gas . . . & wear-and-tear on the BMHA van. And most important, the cost of ‘corrupting the morals’ of BMHA’s poor & downtrodden, who know that some poor are MUCH more equal than others.

COMING: Term limits for BMHA Tenant Commissioners after 22 years?

BMHA’s $82 million budget. Public hearing 10AM, Apr. 3, 300 Perry St.

MORE HUD-funded travel . . . for love of the poor?

Roger’s letters to RCC employees Carol Kelley & Tara Lynch:

Nov. 5: “staff layoff due to lack of funding; employee will be called back . .as soon as funding is available”

Dec. 5: “As a former employee you may apply for any position that matches your qualifications”

COVER-UP of RCC mismanagement, & Roger’s new hand-picked Ex. Dir. (former Common Council Chief-of-Staff Michael Williams)

UPDATE: Residency Enforcement; From Criminal Tamperer to Criminal Mind

Stitts & Pitts at Johnny B Wiley Field . . more boondoggle?

Where’s “Senior Community Builder” Steve Banko? (He’s silently in Charge of the Buffalo

Office of the US Dept. of HOUSING & URBAN DEVELOPMENT . .as Buffalo faces URBAN DISSOLUTION!)

Comments? Corrections? Call 882-23888; Richard Kern, MSW, Feb 28,2002
WEBSITE: www.kernwatch.com email: Kernwatch@AOL.com