City considers housing authority lawsuit

An alleged failure by the Cotulla Housing Authority to provide City Hall with a set of financial records and meeting minutes dating back four decades has prompted councilors to seek legal advice on whether to file suit against the agency.

Councilors met with Attorney Steve Pena behind closed doors for an hour Thursday, December 12, but emerged to say they had not taken any action and made no further motions.

Mayor Sandra Luna said she had made a request during the summer that the CHA open its books to scrutiny but the response gave little or no information of value.

The CHA was represented by Attorney Joaquin Rodriguez at Thursday’s meeting, although neither he nor CHA board member Nicole Villarreal were invited to speak to councilors during their executive session.

According to the attorney, the housing authority is under no obligation to provide regular reports to City Hall and is not legally bound to offer any more information than has been provided, although Mayor Sandra Luna disputes the claim.

Nora Ayala, executive director of the housing authority, said in an interview this week that Luna made the request for the records in her capacity as mayor on behalf of the city, and that communication between Luna and the CHA has not involved the council.

In a September 16 letter to the housing authority, Luna wrote that her request for records dating back to 1985 had not been met and that the housing authority had thereby violated state law regarding the availability of public information.

Ayala contended this week that the mayor’s letter constituted a threat.

Attorney Rodriguez and Villarreal presented councilors with a five-page report on Thursday, signed on a cover sheet by accountant Enrique Gonzalez in November 2023. Councilors had no questions for the housing authority board member. Ayala was present at Thursday’s council meeting but made no public comment and was not questioned by the council.

The accountant had noted on the report’s cover page that he had not audited the financial statements and had no opinion or conclusion to express.

The report covers the housing authority’s financial statements for the fiscal year ending on September 30, 2023.

“Everything. We asked for everything,” the mayor said of the open-records request made in August. “This is what they gave us? A financial statement from 2023.”

The mayor said she believes the housing authority is obligated to provide City Hall with its records, and pointed to a city ordinance to that effect.

“We had to go back to 1967 to find it, but there it is,” the mayor said after last week’s meeting. “This report doesn’t cover any of what we asked for, and it doesn’t show us anything.”

Luna said she has asked for a full accounting of all the housing authority’s financial activities, details of all its board meetings and decisions made.

Ayala said this week that the request covered every aspect of the housing authority’s activities and finances over a 40-year period. Those records, she said, are not stored on computer software and cannot be retrieved “with the click of a button.”

“I don’t answer to the city or the county,” the housing authority director said on Tuesday. “I answer to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. They inspect our records every three years, and they have classified us as a high performer. We scored a hundred, basically.

“If we were a low performer, they would be inspecting our books more often,” Ayala said.

The mayor also said she has been approached with reports of failures by the housing authority to address residents’ needs. Luna did not indicate whether she believed such claims could be substantiated through a study of the authority’s board meeting minutes.

“There was a resident who complained that he didn’t have a fridge,” Ayala said. “Well, we gave him a fridge, and he sold it for drug money. Are we going to give him another one? He’s in jail now.”

The mayor said on Thursday that she is dissatisfied with the CHA response to her requests for information. She wrote in her Sept. 16 letter to the CHA that the agency had “not provided any response to the open records request dated August 21.”

“Our next step is deciding whether we take this case to the Texas attorney general,” the mayor said last week. “That’s where we’re at right now.”

Under Texas law, an open-records request for public information must be handled with a response within ten days. Those who are being asked for records may either provide the material in the request, ask for more time to compile the records, or may ask that the request be more specific, in the event of a large amount of material being sought. An agency is prevented by law from asking what the information will be used for or why the request is being made. An agency may, however, assess a fee for clerical work and other resources in reproducing or collating large amounts of public records.

Failure by any agency holding public records to comply with an open-records request may result in action by the state attorney general.

“All of the above,” Ayala said of the CHA response to the August request. “We have a small staff. The amount of material that the mayor herself asked for was so much, and we are already busy here. We can’t pull all these records in such a short time. We asked the mayor to be more specific, and to give us more time, and we said that we would need to charge for the work.”

Ayala added that the CHA has focused on available records, which date back five years, and that she has complied with the request for the first of those five years, having submitted records from 2019.

“We still have the next four years to go through,” the housing authority director said.

“The housing authority was going to charge us a fee for this information,” the mayor said Thursday. “We are a government agency, so obviously we are exempt.”

In her Sept. 16 letter, the mayor pointed out to Ayala that the Texas attorney general has set a price of ten cents per copy for public records, contesting the fee of $1.20 per sheet.

“The mayor also asked us for bank statements from 2024,” Ayala said. “We have provided those.

“We are paying an attorney to handle this,” Ayala added. “That’s taxpayer money. The city is doing the same. How can we spend money on an attorney when we only have operating expenses available for our housing units?”

“I believe we have a right to see those books,” Luna said after last week’s council meeting. “I believe the people have a right to know what’s going on.”