The State Bond Commission approved funding for two affordable housing developments in New Orleans, after several months of pushing the developers to justify the costs. Rep. Tony Bacala, a commission member who has been outspoken about questioning those costs, still isn’t convinced all the project expenses are reasonable. “These people had significant amounts of money invested,” he says, so members decided “we’re not going to change the rules of the game midstream.”
Looking forward, he expects to see more scrutiny of the sorts of projects that previous commissions generally had pretty much rubber-stamped. “The architect fees seemed out of line. The contractor fees seemed out of line,” Bacala says. “Sometimes it’s a smell test. It just doesn’t smell right. It doesn’t look right.”
Developers and housing advocates point to the need for quality affordable housing and note that construction costs have been rising across the board. The projects are backed with federal tax credits, not state dollars, though they do count against the state’s bonding capacity.
Treasurer John Fleming, who chairs the commission, says there haven’t really been guidelines about appropriate costs that members could apply to given projects. “Why do we have oversight responsibilities, yet we have no parameters, no guidelines, nothing really to go by?”
At Gov. Jeff Landry’s urging, the Louisiana Housing Corporation has updated its Qualified Allocation Plan. Fleming expects the new cost guidelines to result in a healthier process. “They know that if they’re not complying with the guidelines in the QAP, they’re probably gonna be kicked back,” he says.
—They said it: “I’m out there looking for a jaguar. They’re like, ‘Well, we got plenty, [but] none of them got spots.’ Can we paint him?” —Gov. Jeff Landry joking about getting a live jaguar on campus at Southern University, reported by WAFB
