Five leading advocates for people living with HIV/AIDS in Georgia have accused Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ administration of malfeasance, negligence, and unethical behavior resulting in potentially lost lives.
In a strongly-worded letter this week, they urged the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to take the extraordinary step of terminating a multi-million dollar city grant that subsidizes rent for thousands with the disease and have those funds administered through the state's Department of Community Affairs.
The authors of the letter founded or represent some of the leading agencies in the HIV/AIDS fight in Georgia and elsewhere - including Georgia Equality, Positive Women’s Network, and Thrive SS.
“We are operating with a grantee that views itself as being beyond accountability and consequences,” the letter states. “There are no legitimate checks and balances in our local system that would stop the inappropriate and unethical behavior we’ve seen over the years.”
The May 5 letter, written by Jeff Graham, Eric Paulk, Daniel Driffin, Emily Brown and Breanna Diaz, is the culmination of months of correspondence between the city, HUD and the advocates.
The grant, formally known as Housing Opportunities to Persons With AIDS, serves as a lifeline to low-income people with the disease. The driving theory of the program is that providing stable homes to a vulnerable population helps prevent the transmission of the disease.
Without the stress of finding a place to sleep each night, people living with HIV/AIDS can better focus on obtaining jobs that offer healthcare, visiting the doctor and having a place to store the medication that keeps them alive.
Brown cited a study published in 2019 that found that homeless people diagnosed with HIV in San Francisco had a 27-fold greater risk of dying from the disease than those who were housed.
The predicament only stands to get worse as Atlanta's funds are projected to be slashed by the federal government in less than two years.
“In any other setting, the City of Atlanta’s contract would have been terminated years ago,” the letter says.
In a written statement, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said many of the issues with the mismanagement of funds began under the administration of former Mayor Kasim Reed.
“While there are certainly misrepresentations of facts in this letter, we hear and understand the frustration with the inherited and long-standing systemic challenges with HOPWA,” the statement said. “Leadership and operational changes have been made and the City will continue to cultivate input from advocates and the public to fix what is broken and—most importantly — provide individuals living with HIV/AIDS the support and dignity they deserve.”
The spokesperson didn't respond to a question from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about whether Bottoms would object to surrendering the city's distribution of HOPWA funds.
But in the letter the advocates say Bottoms’ has had a year to fix the program after “one of the most significant crises in our nation’s history due to the city’s malfeasance” — a reference to the collapse of the Living Room, an organization that worked with providers who arranged housing for 250 households.
Former Living Room Executive Director Jerome Brooks said most of his clients kept their housing through other agencies, but about 20 people were evicted.
“These are real lives we are talking about,” said Jeff Graham, executive director of Georgia Equality, about why he and the others who signed the letter had requested such an extreme measure.
Graham sits on Bottoms’ LGBTQ+ Advisory Board.
‘Rebuild a burning plane’
Under the HOPWA grant, the city is supposed to disperse $23 million a year to agencies who coordinate housing for 2,300 households in 29 metro Atlanta counties.
But for years, the city has severely delayed disbursements to the nonprofits who coordinate housing arrangements and other care for HIV/AIDS patients and their families, and tens of millions of the dollars have gone unspent.
The arrangement forces the organizations to obtain private bridge loans in hopes that the city will eventually reimburse them — a situation that has frustrated providers for years because of the seemingly needless interest rates they have to pay.
HUD has already threatened to terminate Atlanta's award after an investigation last year revealed chronic mismanagement, a persistent lack of financial controls and a deeply rooted inability to adhere to the federal grant guidelines, according to a February letter from HUD to the city.
In the letter, HUD imposed strict guidelines on how the city accounts for and disburses this year’s award.
Atlanta’s “failure to comply with the terms of these specific grant conditions may result in HUD pursuing termination,” it said.
Last year, Bottoms established the HOPWA Advisory Committee to make recommendations about fixing the program.
But Driffin, co-founder of Thrive SS, an organization dedicated to supporting African Americans stricken with HIV/AIDS and who is a member of the advisory committee, said the city has refused to provide the necessary information to allow committee members to offer advice.
The city initially refused to release the HUD correspondence that threatened to terminate the award to its own committee. Members only obtained it after Brooks filed a public records request for the document. And then officials took three weeks to release the record.
“To be clear, we believe that the HOPWA Advisory Committee is hollow and serves as a shell the City of Atlanta uses to convince HUD that its plans and actions have community support,” the May 5 letter from the advocates says.
In less than two years, HUD is projected to slash Atlanta's HOPWA funding from $23 million to as low as $9 million, a 60% drop and the second steepest in the nation because of a shift the U.S. Congress made to the funding formula in 2016.
The Atlanta metro area has the nation’s third-highest rate of new HIV infections.
Atlanta has had five years to plan for the blow. Half of that time period occurred under Bottoms. Driffin said the city simply isn’t prepared.
“We are trying to rebuild a burning plane while flying it, with the knowledge that we’re getting ready to fly into a mountain,” says the letter.
Driffin compared putting the program under state control to the debate in the Georgia General Assembly about whether a state authority should run Atlanta’s Hartsfield Jackson International Airport because of corruption associated with airport contracting.
Charlie Frew, executive director of the Jerusalem House, the region’s largest HOPWA recipient, called the letter an accurate description of what has transpired with the grant and said placing it with the Department of Community Affairs seemed a viable option.
“I think at this point in time something has to change,” Frew said.
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