It must have been a lonely year for the three aldermen.
When Indianola’s Ruben Woods, Marvin Elder and Sam Brock Jr. voted last December in favor of allowing the city to pay local contractor Spencer Construction $38,900, they felt like they were doing a good deed for a small business, even as former City Attorney Kimberly Merchant advised them during multiple meetings that the payment would likely be illegal, because the city did not have a contract with Spencer.
They hardly could have foreseen the fallout that would come from that vote.
There was a state auditor’s investigation, followed by demand letters to the aldermen in July to repay the money. Then there was civil action filed this fall by the attorney general against the aldermen and their bonding company for failure to repay the money.
The fallout from the payout is The Enterprise-Tocsin’s 2024 Story of the Year, and it continues to be a source of controversy, as Mayor Ken Featherstone leveled a series of accusations during a public meeting last Thursday against Mississippi Home Corporation, the quasi-governmental agency at the center of the program that led to this debacle.
“A lot of heat has come down on the City of Indianola, a lot of bad ink and a lot of bad press has come our way, particularly toward our three aldermen,” Featherstone said last week.
With each headline that followed the payout, Woods, Elder and Brock found themselves more isolated than ever.
“At one time, the whole city government and citizens had turned on us,” Woods said during a public statement last week. “People who were my friends would say, ‘Give me some of the money that you took.’ I’d say, ‘What money?’”
Indeed, Woods, Elder and Brock did not pocket a dime of the taxpayers’ money.
They saw themselves as righting a wrong, even though, at the time, they had little knowledge about what exactly had gone so wrong with a Housing & Urban Development homeowner rehabilitation grant that had been awarded to the city by Mississippi Home Corporation back in 2019.
The grant, which totaled $392,336, according to MHC, would be administered by South Delta Planning & Development District, and it would experience a number of delays over the next few years, some due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The grant was designed so that the money would pass through the city, but Indianola would not have contracts with the contractors themselves.
In total, there were 45 homes set for rehab work, according to MHC.
At one point, Spencer Construction won the bid on one of the single-family projects.
SDPDD’s Randall Lauderdale told the city during a visit earlier this year that Spencer had completed the project prior to the deadline that he had been given, but by that point, HUD had already frozen the funds.
Lauderdale suggested during that meeting that MHC bore at least some of the blame for the holdup.
Featherstone, last week, went further.
“Mississippi Home Corp. was grossly out of compliance with HUD, and everything kind of just went downhill from there,” Featherstone said during a 10-plus-minute statement. “Mississippi Home Corp. has not been truthful with us.”
Featherstone said that as late as July of this year, the city was asking MHC about the status of the grant. That is the same month State Auditor Shad White demanded that Woods, Elder and Brock pay back their portions of the $38,900 to the city’s coffers.
“Mississippi Home Corp. said that they were still waiting on HUD, the federal government, to release the money or to provide an extension so that the City of Indianola could be reimbursed. We found out that was not…the case,” Featherstone said.
Featherstone said that same month, HUD issued a list of corrective actions for MHC to take.
“It’s very extensive, the list of infractions Mississippi Home Corp. had,” Featherstone said. “Mississippi Home Corp. failed to take those corrective actions. None of it was done at all.”
Featherstone claimed that instead of focusing on HUD compliance, MHC instead sent “threatening letters” to the City of Indianola, something MHC Executive Director Scott Spivey denied in an email response to The E-T this week.
“MHC has never issued a demand letter to any of its grantees relating to the involuntary termination of the grants,” Spivey said. “MHC stated in its notice letter that the funds would have to be repaid back to HUD, which is accurate, but we did not suggest a mechanism for doing so, nor did MHC suggest that cities and contractors pay back funds from their own resources.”
Featherstone said that much of the information he relayed last Thursday was learned during a November Washington, D.C. trip by Dr. Adrian Brown of Brown & Associates.
Brown had been authorized by the board that month to investigate the matter while he was in the nation’s capital on other business.
The mayor and board were briefed on the findings during an executive session two weeks ago.
“Everything you said was correct, but still, it cannot excuse the situation that Indianola put itself in,” said Ward 1 Alderman Gary Fratesi last week in response to Featherstone’s statement. “Our attorney told us not to pay…I hope that HUD is going to send the money down through and make everybody whole again, and I hope they do that, but we as aldermen have to stand by the law.”
If the money indeed thaws and makes its way to the city, the state’s actions against Woods, Elder and Brock may be dropped.
Meanwhile, MHC denied all of the city’s allegations in its response this week.
“MHC has been made aware of the statements made by Mayor Featherstone and several aldermen at the Board of Aldermen Meeting on December 19, 2024,” MHC’s Spivey said. “None of the statements were true or accurate regarding MHC’s relationship with HUD or its relationship with its grantees.”
Spivey said that Mississippi Home Corporation granted its first extension for the grant in August 2021, “Due to projects not being completed with a new expiration date of 08/2022. In August of 2022, MHC granted yet another extension due to projects not being completed, with a new expiration date of 08/2023. In August of 2023, MHC requested an extension from HUD because the work was still not completed. At that point, Indianola had only drawn down $16,000 of its original $392,336 grant, a paltry 4% of their total grant amount for eligible, completed activities.”
Spivey said that this past July, “HUD informed MHC that they would not grant an additional extension of the grant funds, and that those activities would be involuntarily terminated. As a result, 45 activities were involuntarily terminated; each of those activities represented a home that was selected for rehabilitation.”
Spivey said that MHC met with senior HUD officials in late September in Jackson to discuss “Different methods of ensuring the grant activities were completed. Several solutions were presented, and we are still working with HUD toward a solution.”
He added that MHC hopes that all 45 homes that were selected in the original grant will be rehabbed.
“MHC continues to work toward a solution in which the city and the contractors it selected can rehabilitate the homes for the homeowners, and we look forward to resolution soon,” Spivey said. “Speeches are easy. Work is difficult. MHC remains committed to doing the work to provide safe, decent, and affordable housing for our fellow Mississippians.”
Featherstone insisted last week that all of the allegations he brought forth could be backed up by documentation.
“All of the information has not come out on this, and it very well will come out,” he said. “Everything that I tell is true. It has been fact-checked and vetted up one side and down the other… As public as they made the problem with our city and with our aldermen, we’re going to make their discrepancies just as public.”
Featherstone has maintained since last year that the decision to pay Spencer came from a good place.
“Everything was messed up before it got to the City of Indianola, and all our aldermen tried to do was operate in good faith to make certain that one of our local businesses, Spencer Construction, does not go out of business,” Featherstone said.
Brock thanked the mayor for his statement during last week’s meeting, suggesting that perhaps the moral good justified the legal infraction.
“Not all things are graded by the law,” he said, “It’s by honesty and respect.”
