Good afternoon, everybody.

I'd like to call to order the July twenty-eighth meeting of the Chattanooga City Council.

Um, and it's my turn to do the pledge and invocation today, but I have asked a young man who needs no introduction, uh Jack Dooley, who is here with us just about every week, I believe, um just asked him if he would honor us by leading us in our pledge and invocation uh this afternoon, and he's graciously agreed.

So Jack Please say to pledge with me as you will.

First of all, um first Timothy two.

First of all, then I urge supplications, prayers, intersections, and thanksgivings be made for all people.

For kings and and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet, godly and dignified in every way.

Amen.

Um if you haven't been with us before, um just give kind of a rundown of how our meetings operate so you'll know what to expect.

Uh first I would just ask everybody with silence or turn off your cell phone so we don't have any uh distractions during the meeting.

Um our meetings operate in two parts.

So the first part uh is what we call an agenda session, um where we will um have some special presentations, uh approval of our minutes from our last meeting, and then um council will go through items that are on our agenda to be voted on this evening, as well as items on our agenda for next week and then items further out, uh three or more weeks into the future.

Um and that's a time for council um up here on the dais to ask questions or uh raise any comments that they might like to make about any um particular item.

Um after that, um we have committee and department reports, uh which we don't um have one of those today, and so we will uh take a recess at that point.

And when we come back from our recess, uh that will be the business portion of our meeting where we will vote on all the items on our agenda for this evening.

At the end of that business meeting, the very end of our meeting in total today, there will be a time for members of the public who would like to address the council on any topics that you'd like to address us on.

And when the time comes for that, we would just ask that you line up at the podium down front here, and our city attorney will read some rules at that time.

So with that being said, we do by way of special presentation today, have some guests here from the Chattanooga Housing Authority.

So yesterday was a pretty busy day for our HEB board with some affordable housing proposals across the city.

And one of those was in my district, and I know there were some in other districts as well.

And so I just asked them to come today, and I think they have a few short um slides to present and some information, and then they'll be gracious enough to answer questions we might have.

Thank you, Chairman.

As most of you know, my name's Joe Kelly.

I'm the general counsel for the Chattanooga Housing Authority.

Betsy McGriot, our executive director, is also here to help answer questions.

But I'll take the lead since I was the person that I discovered yesterday inadvertently spread confusion throughout the city of Chattanooga over the weekend.

And I appreciate the opportunity to come here today and try to clarify where things stand with CHA and these projects for both the council and the public at large.

But I want to first of all apologize for for any uh confusion that uh I have sort of wandered into, which happens to me from time to time.

So I'm sorry I brought you all with me.

Uh I've got just a couple slides to give a very high-level view of what has happened and why it happened and where we go from here.

Uh a lot of this uh the council has already heard.

Uh uh, as you know, uh the C CHA has what is called 1,287 units of what is called Faircloth Authority, and that comes from uh a law that was passed at the federal level in 1998 that caps all public housing across the country at the number of units that existed as of that date.

What it further provided, though, was that to the extent any units that existed on that date were later demolished and taken out of service, those units became what is called Faircloth Authority or availability for a housing authority.

Chattanooga for the size of our city, we have a very large faircloth availability of 1,287 units.

And just as a way of background, a big part of the reason we have that large uh availability pool is the demolition of some of our legacy older public housing sites uh in the first few years of this decade.

Uh Harriet Tubman Homes is the largest, and then also uh Maurice Poss homes.

Uh those two make up over 700 or approximately 700 units, and then with other demolitions in smaller areas across uh time, that's how we get to the total of 1,287.

So those are essentially a possible public subsidy that is available for the city of Chattanooga that's been sitting there uh since the early 2000s.

Uh and it is either allocated to Chattanooga or it goes somewhere else.

So, in essence, it's either use it or lose it.

If I go to the next slide.

So the first question I'm I'm sure you're asking is well, why haven't we used it?

Why has it been sitting there for this long?

And the reason is simple is while the 98 law created this availability, the law did not create any mechanism to utilize those in new construction.

So there was no way to take those vouchers and turn it into something that lenders can loan money against to actually build apartments.

Uh so it was there, it was nice in theory, uh, but there was no way to monetize that and turn it into actual housing.

Uh that changed uh in 2025.

Uh the HUD issued guidance for what it now calls the uh restore rebuild program.

And this program for the first time allowed public housing authorities to take their fair cloth authority, and then through a very convoluted series of transactions that I I'm not gonna put anybody to sleep with here today.

I'll be glad to follow up with anybody later, turn those in to financeable construction projects so that affordable housing could be built.

And just to give a sense of the scale of what 1,287 vouchers means, you know, that sounds uh you know that's a fairly abstract number, but what that translates into uh even at the most conservative valuations over a 20-year income stream for these projects uh for those vouchers, that's $340 million in subsidy.

That $340 million, which is available to Chattanooga, if we utilize it, can then be utilized to put into a capital stack and construct new units that will generate five to six hundred million in new construction, new jobs.

And when you combine that with other financing tools that are available, we think that we have a financeable ceiling of up to 2,000 units.

I don't think we'll ultimately construct that many because we're gonna have limitations on site sizes, things like that, but it's gonna be a sizable number, somewhere between 1,200 to 2,000 units.

Um what is all that for?

Well, it's for the citizens of Chattanooga.

We all hear about uh the problems we have with affordability.

Who does that mean?

Well, that means the nurse you see when you go to the doctor, the nurse's assistant who sees to you in the hospital, teachers and teachers' aides who teach your children, the police officers that answer calls, the firefighters.

Uh lots of those folks that provide the day-to-day work here in this city are being priced out of Hamilton County, and particularly the city limits.