BRUNSWICK — The Brunswick Housing Authority has joined a coalition of 11 housing authorities nationally to request that U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan cut costly red tape they say make it impossible to keep critical housing programs running.

“When the federal government provides us 75 cents for every dollar it takes to administer the voucher program and cuts the funding to modernize and make repairs to public housing apartments by more than 33 percent in two years, we simply can’t afford needless bureaucracy,” said Houston Housing Authority President and CEO Tory Gunsolley, in a release issued Wednesday. “With so much less money, now more than ever, housing authorities need the authority from HUD to put as much as possible directly into housing services.”

According to the release, the group wants Donovan to streamline processes and make it easier for them to maintain their programs in today’s difficult funding environment. They ask HUD to quickly allow them to cut red tape in three areas: resident services, housing development and operational efficiencies — as their local needs dictate.

The group’s proposal “outlines how the HUD secretary can use existing legal authority to streamline program operations and better address local needs. The proposed process is similar to a Department of Education initiative that grants localities flexibility from some of the one-sizefits all requirements of the ‘No Child Left Behind Act.’ The streamlined process proposed by the group would also enable HUD to more quickly review and approve similar proposals,” the release states.

Unlike the current system, a new proposal would allow agencies to save money faster and better serve residents, Anthony O’Leary, executive director of the Akron (Ohio) Housing Authority, said in the release.

John Hodge, executive director of the Brunswick Housing Authority, said in a phone interview Thursday that, “We’ve been part of the industry wide chorus that has been asking for regulatory relief in a lot of the program requirements that we are required to follow through with.”

“It’s the golden rule,” Hodge said. “Whoever gives you the gold, you have to follow their rules,” which can be frustrating. During the last two or three years, the BHA has experienced a reduction in funding, yet must still meet the same requirements, according to Hodge.

The administrative fees paid by HUD are used to administer 453 housing vouchers in the Brunswick area, process applications and help applicants find homes, Hodge said.

The final phase of that process involves giving those individuals an orientation, finding them an apartment, negotiating rent with the landlord, signing contracts with the landlord and tenant, monitoring the income eligibility of participants, and inspecting apartments on an annual basis.

“We’re now down to about 80 percent of what we technically should be receiving for administrative fees, so that forced us to have to lay off one staff person in our housing program,” Hodge said.

The Brunswick Housing Authority merged public housing staff and voucher staff in one office, so now “three people are doing the job of four,” Hodge said. Yet the same requirements remain.

The four remaining BHA employees — a housing manager and two occupancy specialists in addition to Hodge — oversee about 700 apartments.

Hodge said that for the last several years, the housing sector has tried to get Congress to enact regulatory reform — such as the Section 8 Voucher Reform Act (SEVRA). While it had been adopted in the House at one point, and then the Senate at one point, Congress has never passed a bill for the president to sign, “and that’s been frustrating,” Hodge said.

The reform act contained what Hodge called common sense relief that all the parties agreed on. “Yet because our issues are so down the ladder, so to speak, of importance, they don’t get acted on,” he said.

“So what a group of us did is get together,” and at no cost to the BHA, the housing authorities hired an attorney funded by the larger authorities and other industry groups, “to take a look at existing federal law,” and at what authority the current HUD secretary already has to waive regulations, “so this way we don’t need to wait for Congress to pass a law.”

The group developed a 19-page regulatory waiver proposal, and while some of the proposals won’t apply to BHA, Hodge said, other elements will.

“The gist of all this is we’re trying to reduce the amount of staff time on processing household information so that we can focus on those households we should be focusing on,” Hodge said. “It’s just saying, ‘Look, you’ve cut our funds, you need to reduce what’s expected from us.”

dmoore@timesrecord.com