HUD, SWONAP officials meet with NHA: Navajo Nation to invigorate housing efforts

By Rick Abasta
Navajo Housing Authority

FT. DEFIANCE – Federal officials last month met with the Navajo Housing Authority, the Division of Community Development, and the president’s office to discuss how NHA could help the Navajo Nation with providing safe and sanitary housing to families.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Southwest Office of Native American Programs visited – the Navajo Nation – with four tribal housing authorities in the region on Oct. 23. The group also visited with housing providers at Acoma Pueblo, White Mountain Apache, and Zuni Pueblo.

CEO report

Former NHA CEO Heather L. Duncan-Etsitty provided an overview of NHA’s activities, including the recent memorandum of agreement with Navajo Engineering and Construction Authority to provide horizontal construction of infrastructure, streamlining internal processes to meet the housing needs on Navajo, the four pillars guiding NHA’s direction, housing occupancy and vacancy rates, and fostering relationships with tribal and federal leadership during the past year.

“We need to make houses better and faster, so we can get people into a home because that’s what our job is,” she said.

Meeting the Undesignated Fund Factor was another area that Duncan-Etsitty highlighted, noting that NHA exceeded the UDFF by $4.2 million. She said going into the new program year, NHA has spent close to $8 million since late September and in October.

“The NECA memorandum of agreement is significant because of the challenges we have getting contractors on the Navajo Nation,” she said, adding that NHA hasn’t had an MOA for almost 15 years.

“What we’re really looking at doing is collaborating with NTUA or other enterprises, to look at our long-term plans and gauge our Indian Housing Plan around what they are doing so there is no duplication of work,” she said. “I’ve been working on this enterprise meeting since my arrival (to NHA) and so far, we’ve met with NECA and Indian Health Services.”

She said master planning for housing with 10 chapters is also underway. A request for proposals has been completed and 10 chapters have been selected for the project.

“Chapters don’t have money to do master planning, so we’ll be assisting them with it,” she said.

NHA Chief Administrative Officer Terrilynn Cook spoke next and said NHA has spent the last year assessing the organization and engaging employees for goals and objectives at the management level.

Employee engagement survey

Initiatives like the employee engagement survey led to the creation of the four strategic pillars: meeting IHP planned expenditures, optimizing internal functions, maintaining HUD compliance, and strengthening partnerships.

“Establishing stability for NHA is the number one thing that we’re trying to do,” Cook said. “Since 2017, we’ve been changing (CEOs) every year.”

Establishing a knowledge base through leveraging resources, training, development of technical expertise with the Native American Housing and Self Determination Act of 1996, and cross-training are all integral components of creating a robust training program for 2025, she explained.

“We’re going from fear of making decisions to embracing policies and taking our blinders off,” Cook said. “We need to find our ‘chi’ (circulating life force).”

As part of the NHA reorganization of the past year, policies and procedures were prioritized; some were rescinded, and others were consolidated. Setting procurement expenditure goals was another area for improvement – NHA spent $68 million in the past year but has spent as much as $154 million annually in the past.

“We’ve created a comprehensive dashboard between division chiefs to align the process and our IT division director is addressing automation, processing day-to-day operations, refreshing the IT plan, and developing a scope of work for an enterprise plan that will provide real-time data dashboards,” Cook added.

Omni channel efforts

Omni channel access for internal and external data solutions is another area of focus, said Cook, noting that all procurement must also align with the Buy American, Build American guidelines provided by HUD.

“We’re communicating with our contractors, and we are planning to go live December 1,” she said.

NHA Chief Financial Officer Raymond Nopah said NHA is creating a baseline and getting back to basics to gauge performance and measure progress. He said meeting the UDFF in September was part of building capacity to address the backlog of proposals.

The HUD field monitoring report has three outstanding issues related to program income and non-program income, said Nopah, adding that those issues have been addressed and that the final step left is to issue a letter to HUD detailing the resolution.

“We had 33 audit findings and we’ve brought that down to 14. The only (audit findings) remaining are from 2021 to 2023, and a lot of those are duplicates,” he said. “By March 2025, we should have those down to five audit findings.”

Nopah commended Nellie Gilmore, NHA’s grants manager, for creating a process for efficient grants management that led to the submission of the IHP before the HUD deadline. NHA management worked with field offices to determine the capacity to complete projects and addressed dormant projects for completion or reprogramming of funding to other projects.

“We continue to create coordination and build capacity for performance indicators at HUD because we know Congress wants to know where everything is at. Any guidance, references, and resources is appreciated,” Nopah said.

Enterprise architecture

NHA Chief Operations Officer Ernest Franklin led a PowerPoint presentation on the NHA enterprise architecture that provides a framework for how the 15 housing management offices communicate and interact with one another. This includes the NHA Board of Commissioners, the Executive Branch, the financial services branch, the administrative branch, and the operations branch.

Modernization activities for public rental units and homeownership development, model activities, new construction, infrastructure development, and environmental reporting are just a few areas that are being tracked through the system.

“We want to get into a rhythm with policies and procedures so we can get other funding sources,” Franklin said.

Franklin said a housing study was conducted that identified the need for 30,000 homes that needed to be built in the Navajo Nation, noting that infrastructure was not included.

“We’re doing a utility capacity analysis for our 10-year plan and this will include the capacity needed for future housing, using current demographics,” he said. “This is why we’re establishing partnerships.”

1,000 home initiative

Patrick Sandoval, President Buu Nygren’s chief of staff, spoke next and began with a rhetorical question: who qualifies for a home from NHA? Answer: low-income families.

“The Navajo Nation would like to sit down with HUD to over these qualification guidelines because salaries disqualify people from applying for housing,” he said. “President Nygren’s thousand home initiative is about clearing the red tape and bureaucracy for housing.”

Sandoval said the Navajo Nation has $9 billion in the bank right now, including American Rescue Plan Act funds that should be utilized to address housing and the bonding capacity on the reservation.

“We need multi-use, low-income, mixed-density housing,” he said. “How many homes are unoccupied by NHA right now?”

Vacant units

Duncan-Etsitty responded that there are 468 vacant units because of a variety of reasons, ranging from changes in the board composition and vision, change in direction and leadership at NHA, vandalism, and needed renovations including major repairs due to meth and fentanyl exposure in the housing units.

“Coming on (to work at NHA), I said our focus really needs to be on basic public rental units, so we hired 58 temporary maintenance staff to help us repair these 468 units,” she said.

Some homes, she said, are boarded up but ready for occupancy. They’re boarded up because of vandalism, she explained, noting that the boards prevent windows from being broken.

“We have 636 people on our waitlist for housing right now and we had about 1,400 on the waitlist when I started,” she said. “Our families shouldn’t be chasing us for occupancy, we’re a service to the people.”

Duncan-Etsitty said 185 units are ready for occupancy.

HUD officials suggested essential housing program opportunities, conveying homeownership units, federal tax credits, and partnerships with healthcare facilities to provide housing to Navajo families as possible solutions.

Franklin said tenants do not want to move out of the public rental units because they have adapted their lives to low-rent housing.

Tolerance for chaos

“I’ve been here long enough to know that if we don’t have stability up front, it ain’t going to go nowhere,” Franklin said. “We’ve been through 10 CEOs in the past five years; the stability is not there and that’s what scares me about Heather leaving.”

The revolving door of leadership always results in strategic realignment, moving staff around, changes to the IHP, and different goals and objectives.

“People come in with different ambitions. The reason why things are working now is because Heather was from NHA already and she didn’t realign the IHP,” Franklin said. “We had one CEO come in and change everything (on the IHP) to tax credit, and that complicated everything.”

SWONAP Administrator Corinna Stiles responded that SWONAP will continue to provide assistance to NHA, but that problems such as playing musical chairs with CEOs only create disorder and addressed her comments to the only NHA board member in attendance at the meeting.

“Mr. (David) Sloan (NHA Board vice president): HUD’s tolerance for chaos is narrowing and the flexibility we were willing to provide is quickly narrowing,” she said.

“What’s HUD’s opinion of the current leadership, progress, and movement at NHA? Do you have any indicator?” asked Sandoval.

“Last week, we had our first quarterly meeting with the Navajo Nation and NHA about the successes of FY 2024,” Stiles said. “What we presented at the meeting was full of accomplishments and successes and we presented that information to President Nygren’s staff in Washington, D.C.”

“Ms. Duncan, one of the things I’d like to do is get you before the president immediately,” Sandoval said. “We need to talk about the stability because one of the worst things right now is instability.”

SWONAP Deputy Administrator Floyd Tortalita spoke next and prefaced his comments by saying he worked for Indian housing for more than 25 years, 16 of which were as executive director of the Acoma Housing Authority.

He witnessed the growth of NHA, especially during his time as a board member of the Native American Indian Housing Council, during the time NHA leadership faced scrutiny for unexpended funding.

NHA Board of Commissioners composition

“This is the first time I’ve really seen on Navajo that this is how they’re going to spend and how they’re going to expend over the years,” Tortalita said. “It’s a lot of progression that’s been happening.

“As someone who came from that side of the fence before coming here (to HUD), it’s a lot,” he added.

Sandoval questioned the composition of the NHA Board of Commissioners and asked when the terms of service would expire for commissioners.

“That’s one board that we really haven’t paid attention to, but we’re going to get some folks on it. There’s some good-looking progress here and we obviously want to stay on that track,” Sandoval said. “We will probably need a meeting with the board as well.”

Duncan-Etsitty received an email Oct. 18, that included a letter from her supervisor, Tammy Yazzie, the NHA Board of Commissioners chair, stating that her contract would not be renewed.

The meeting concluded and officials from HUD and SWONAP joined NHA for site visits to the Capital Vue Apartment Complex project in Window Rock and new housing stock constructed in Rock Springs, New Mexico.

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