The Arlington City Council held a special meeting on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, in the Council Briefing Room at 101 W. Abram Street, Arlington, Texas. Mayor J. Ross called the meeting to order at 1:03 p.m. and immediately convened the council in executive session, which lasted until 3:32 p.m.; the open session reconvened at 3:38 p.m. and adjourned at 5:00 p.m. All nine council members were present (Ross, Galante, Gonzalez, Hunter, Ware, Garcia-Dumas, Pham, Hogg, Shelton), along with City Manager Trey Yelverton, City Attorney Molly Shortall, and City Secretary Martha Garcia. The afternoon was a discussion-only work and issues session covering the Arlington Housing Authority annual report, financial resilience, the FY2027 budget, Tarrant County election polling place reductions, and committee reports; no formal votes were taken during the afternoon session. The Mayor also presented a recognition certificate to intern Lauren Viegas for her summer service with the Mayor and Council offices.
It's fun, it's community, it's comradeship, it's I'm doing something useful, and I enjoy it. We're actually doing something for something that needs to be done, animal shelters and helping take care of the little critters that wander through here. We're gonna go ahead and call the afternoon session of the Arlington City Council meeting to order. Mindy, before you get going. I love doing this. When the city attorney freaks out because I go off real. Come up here and help me with this. But a number of council members have come to me. Lauren has been here all summer long helping us as an intern. So we're going to do a little something special for her for Lauren Viegas in recognition and sincere appreciation of your outstanding volunteer service and dedicated contributions as an intern with the office of the mayor and city council of Arlington. Your professionalism, commitment, and spirit of public service exemplify the values that strengthen our community. This is a housing authority annual report today. This is just the agenda that we're going to go through. The housing authority supports, as you all know, low-income families throughout the year. We had about $52 million budget. You can see the budget for the various programs there. Our housing choice voucher program for FY27 is going to be about $55 million, so a three million dollars more than it was in FY25. This here shows our balance sheet and our revenues. And our total revenues were 50 almost 56 million. We're projecting 60 million in FY27. We were serving about an average of 3200, almost 3300 families throughout the year. On the right hand side, I think that's really important. We're charged with making sure that all of our programs and the clients that we serve follow the regulations and our administrative plan. And when they don't, um we call them on the carpet. So about 30 families were terminated for violation of program rules over the over the course of the year. This shows the number of inspections that are done throughout the year. And our inspection team is a team of three. Two full-time inspectors and a supervisor that also supervises housing rehab. So they're a very efficient group. They do a lot of work and they're led by Jessica Perry, sitting right behind me here. For folks that have decided that they don't want to be in this position all their lives. They want to improve their situation and whether that's their income or their credit score or their education. We have a team that supports them through the family self-sufficiency program. And they set their goals. They have five years to achieve them. And we had seven graduates last year and have had over 175 since the housing authorities have been there. Currently, we have 103 families. Those families can also use their voucher to purchase a home, and the easiest way to build wealth for an individual or a family is through homeownership. So we have set a goal every year of four of four families achieving home ownership. Last year we had one achieve that. And if you think about these are folks that are very low income to start with, right? So they have to have the same credit employment history savings as anybody else that's buying a home. So it's a really difficult thing to achieve, so we're always happy to celebrate when we can do that. This slide shows our many, many homeless programs. So they all these programs here, nurse family, shelter plus care, they serve different populations of homeless. So they each have their own individual eligibility requirements and program requirements. So lots of small programs, which honestly makes it more difficult to administer, and all these programs plus FSS are administered by Ms. Jimmy Sandberg, sitting right behind me in the red. So I'm gonna go back to that real quick. Some of these programs because HUD has been sued twice now over the notice of funding availability.