Shannon might stay long enough for board to hire new leader

By Ray Gronberg

gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648

DURHAM -- The chief executive officer of the Durham Housing Authority, Harrison Shannon, will resign.

Shannon on Wednesday night gave the DHA board his resignation letter, officially confirming a decision he'd announced to other members of the authority's senior staff earlier in the day.

His employment contract required that he provide 90 days' notice if he wanted to leave in advance of the deal's end in October 2010, DHA board Chairman Tom Niemann said.

The notice period would translate into a departure on March 16, but board members asked "if he would consider allowing us to hold his resignation open and keep the date open, so we as a board could discuss a transition plan," Niemann said.

Shannon agreed to that, opening the possibility he could stay on for a while after March 16. That in turn could save the board the trouble of having to name an interim CEO.

Board members scheduled a special meeting Monday morning to discuss the impending transition.

Niemann said they would likely seek help from the consulting firm, TAG Associates Inc., they hired this fall to help them solve continuing troubles with the authority's Section 8 rental voucher program.

The consultants have "lots of experience," and should be able to assist in gauging the availability of potential replacements and settling on a timeline for hiring a new CEO, he said.

Shannon could not be reached for comment. Niemann would say little about the reasons for the CEO's decision, save that it came on "his own initiative."

"I think he's done a very good job with the housing authority," he added when asked to size up Shannon's tenure.

Other DHA officials could shed little light on the decision. "What [Shannon] told us is that he's just ready to move on," said Jean Bolduc, the authority's corporate communications director.

But in other quarters, news of the decision inspired little surprise. "That's been in the wind for some time," Jack Preiss, a former DHA board member, said Thursday when told Shannon had turned in his resignation.

It was clear that whatever honeymoon Shannon enjoyed with the board after taking office in October 2005 had dissipated, largely because of the Section 8 program.

At different times in his tenure, the program had swung wildly between surplus and deficit. As of Nov. 30 it was about $1.8 million in the red. There had been years it served too few voucher recipients and others it had too many.

There was also a revolving door on the program director's job, a seemingly intractable backlog of file verifications and, at one point, a months-long delay in getting rent checks out to landlords.

Shannon came to Durham three years after being forced out of a similar post in Charlotte. Supporters there saw his ouster as a power play by some members of that agency's board, but critics regarded it as just desserts for problems that included a poor job handling Section 8 waiting lists.

His original appeal to the Durham board included his experience with Hope VI housing redevelopment of the sort DHA has since completed in North-East Central Durham, and his Texas ties with then-U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson.

In Durham Shannon inherited a scandal-plagued agency that HUD officials had on a short leash. They eased up seven months after his arrival, but clamped down again this summer, limiting its purchasing authority, after inspectors said DHA had "ceased to adhere" to federal regulations and its own policies governing procurement.

A former Section 8 director, Bryant Saunders, said after Shannon fired him in October 2008 that DHA's leadership was "reactionary, emotional and misleading," that "standards were subjectively applied," and that it suffered from "a culture of distrust, micromanagement and fear."

On his way out, Saunders also alleged that higher-ups for months had blocked him from firing an incompetent subordinate because she had ties to Shannon. Niemann and the board asked the authority's lawyers to investigate, but have said little about the matter since.

TAG Associates is close to finishing a report on the Section 8 program that will provide "a good road map" for fixing its problems, Niemann said.