A housing project official who illegally used federal funds to lobby for more federal funds — and lied about it — must pay a $75,000 fine, a judge ruled.
The Philadelphia Housing Authority gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.But that wasn’t enough for Carl Greene, its former executive director, who used taxpayer dollars to hire lobbyists to work the levers of power to try to get even more money.
Lobbying by corporations gets a bad enough reputation; K Street lobbyists that taxpayers have to pay for, and whose goals are to make them pay even more, are expressly forbidden.
The housing authority director repeatedly certified that the housing project group was not using federal funds to hire lobbyists, even though it was using American Continental Group, a K Street firm that received $7.1 million in 2014 representing Comcast, Amgen, and the Credit Suisse Group, among others.
In December, an administrative law judge levied two $25,000 penalties, one $10,000 one, and three $5,000 ones against Greene.
HUD has long known that housing authorities illegally lobby for funding, but looked the other way, according to its inspector general.
In fact, the top HUD official in charge of regulating housing projects was a former lobbyist for those housing projects, and she implemented policies to ensure that they could pay their officials exorbitant salaries and didn’t have to perform inspections of their units or report to the feds how well they were performing.
Housing project units, meanwhile, often aren’t even for the poor and needy, because HUD and housing authorities don’t check income levels and don’t enforce requirements for job training and community service, the HUD Inspector General found.
As a result, many poor people are trapped for years at a time on waiting lists, even as longtime housing project residents refuse to perform eight hours of community service per month, and neither HUD nor local authorities take action.
Greene was paid a salary of $350,000, yet owed the Internal Revenue Service $50,000 in federal back taxes, and also failed to pay the mortgage on his home. When the board found out that he secretly had thePhiladelphia Housing Authoritypay hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle sexual harassment claims against him, it fired him, but then it paid him $625,000 to settle a wrongful termination suit.
HUD has barred Greene, who had previously worked in public housing in Atlanta, Detroit and Washington, D.C., from doing business with it for three years.
