Carver County Republicans

The Carver County Community development Agency (the CDA,) came to the Carver County Board of Commissioners Work Session this morning not looking for money, but just wanting the Board to use its AAA bond rating to issue a little over 2 million dollars in G/O bonds to help facilitate the CDA in a 7 million dollar purchase of a 114 unit section 8 apartment building in Chaska so the current tenants won’t be evicted and so the CDA can avoid losing 114 units of senior section 8 housing. The current owners want to sell, and because the 4.5 million dollar 6% MHFA mortgage must be assumed and cannot be paid off, it is unattractive to the private sector.

This all seems very neat, until some questions were asked.

From the statements that I believe I heard at the work session, it seems,

1. If Carver County were to facilitate lots of CDA projects with county G/O bonds, it could place the County’s AAA rating at risk.

1. The financing structure was set up with an eye towards keeping a purchase by the private sector unattractive. Thus arguing that the CDA needs to buy the building because the current LLC owner wants to sell and the financing structure is unattractive to the private sector is circular reasoning, as it was intentionally set up this way to begin with.

1. The residents will not be kicked out if the CDA does not buy the building. They can stay until the MHFA loan is paid off in 2016. No questions were asked about the turnover rate of the units, thus they gave no idea as to how many of the current tenants could be expected to still be in residence 5 years from now.

The CDA came and gave a clear presentation as stated in the first paragraph above. It was only during discussion and questioning that these details came out. Thus, due to a lack of a forthright presentation by the CDA, the true nature of the details of this financial transaction were muddied in obfuscation.

As usual, Commissioner Workman bogged down the proceedings with his quest for information and clarity on an item that the other Commissioners seemed ready to vote on (this is meant as a compliment to Commissioner Workman.) Commissioner Workman and Administrator Hemze expressed an interest in a broader planning perspective, of defining what the role, size and scope of the CDA needs to be going forward. In response to a query of what the size of the CDA needs to be in the context of what is the need for subsidized housing in the County, CDA Director John Sullivan gave the credentials of their 2030 study and asserted that this Comprehensive study indicated a need for 6,700 units. 6,700 housing units would encompass nearly 1 in 4 citizens of Carver County. When I asked Mr. Sullivan about this in the hall outside of the Commissioner’s Chamber, he said of course that is not the number of subsidized CDA units needed. 6,700 is the number of rental units needed in the County. I was not quick enough to ask him why he gave this much bigger 6,700 unit number as an answer to a question about the need for subsidized housing. Thus, the County Commissioners heard a false indication about how big the CDA needs to be, as opposed to the impression that would have been given had Sullivan answered the question of the need for subsidized housing with an actual answer of the number of subsidized housing units needed.

In order to get public input to help them with the decision of whether or not to go through with the bond sale for this project, the CDA will have a public hearing on Oct. 20, the County will have a public hearing on Nov. 1, and the Bond sale is scheduled for Nov. 17.