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Eighteen-year city employee Stephen Barton, asked to resign last Tuesday, was publicly pummeled in a memo by the Berkeley city attorney Wednesday, a six-page document addressed to the mayor and City Council and filled with attacks aimed primarily at Barton, but also at the city manager, deputy city manager and other city staff. 

“The memo raises in a public way what have been long-term cultural problems within the organization,” the former housing director told the Daily Planet in a two-and-a-half-hour interview Friday, in which Barton, 57, detailed the “untruths and distortions” he said he found in the memo. 

Barton says he wants to see the city order a peer review by other attorneys of City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque’s office, as well as an independent examination of the Berkeley Housing Authority.  

“Here we have a personal attack from the highest level [of city government] and a failure to have any impartial inquiry,” he said. “Just as there should be an impartial inquiry and review of what happened in the housing authority, there should also be an inquiry and review of the conduct of the city attorney’s office.”  

The city attorney has declined to discuss the memo, a copy of which can be found by clicking on the “City Attorney Memo” link at www.berkeleydailyplanet.com. 

Despite being asked to resign by the city manager, apparently on the basis of reports from Albuquerque, Barton said he was “honored” to have had the opportunity to serve a municipality whose values are his own. 

Barton said working on housing issues in Berkeley allowed him to promote the “equal dignity of all people, regardless of how much money they have and regardless of their personal background … An important part of that is that people have security in their homes and if they are homeless, that they have homes.” 

“It’s rare you get to do the work you truly believe in and get paid,” Barton said, before launching into the complexities of the housing department and confronting details of the attack against him.  

“Part of my beliefs is the Buddha teaches that wise speech is truthful, helpful, appropriate and kind—I’m going to have a lot of trouble with the kind part,” Barton said at one point in the interview. 

Barton’s tenure 

Barton, who received his doctorate in city and regional planning in 1985 from UC Berkeley, came to the city in 1989 as a housing planner and was named acting director of the Housing Department in 1999, a time at which the Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA)—just one division of a four-division department—was in disarray. 

BHA oversees some 1,800 units of federally funded Section 8 housing in which vouchers are allocated to low-income people who pay about one-third of their income for housing. The federal government pays the balance. Rent levels are set at market rate. BHA also is responsible for 75 units of low-income housing that it owns. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funds and regulates the housing authority. 

As a result of a host of economic, social and bureaucratic missteps leading to faulty data and other problems, HUD designated the agency as “troubled” in 2002. It has not been able to completely pull out of that status—except partially for a short time— despite efforts such as hiring a former HUD official as BHA manager for two years and working with a variety of consultants and outside auditors, many of them recommended by HUD and some of whom made the situation worse, Barton said. 

When evaluating the housing director’s work performance, Barton said one needs to look at the city’s unrealistic expectations. “I’ve been filling two jobs,” he said. 

The Housing Department includes four divisions: Housing Services that serves nonprofit housing development, including housing for seniors and disabled people and code enforcement. Recently, homeless services have been added to the mix. Until a couple of months ago, Barton headed that division, its manager having been removed as part of the cost-savings program put in place about four years ago. 

Another division oversees federal and city funded community agencies; a fourth division focuses on energy conservation and sustainable development. 

Barton cites among his accomplishments, designing ways to capture some of the housing market’s windfall profits for use of individuals without property, such as having developers pay “in lieu fees”—fees to replace the required 20 percent affordable housing and the condominium conversion program. “These efforts have been slow in getting going,” he said, “but will generate millions of dollars every year for the Housing Trust Fund,” money for low-income housing efforts. 

The Albuquerque memo  

Barton turned the sheets of the six-page memo, pointing to examples of what he called “untruths and distortions.”  

One, he said, is that the Albuquerque memo said Barton was often “at odds” with Ingram. “That is completely untrue,” said Barton, who recruited Ingram. “I supported Tia in efforts every step of the way.”  

While Albuquerque’s memo says Ingram was made assistant to the city manager because Barton was “dismissive” of her, Barton says it was a bureaucratic necessity imposed by HUD rules; Ingram had to be made a permanent employee quickly so that she could gain access to HUD data. Giving her the position of assistant to the city manager made that possible. 

But after a few months of this arrangement, Barton said Kamlarz wanted Ingram to report directly to him, to avoid confusion in reporting responsibilities. 

This, however, renders other Albuquerque’s allegations “a catch-22,” he said, since the memo holds him responsible for things happening at the housing authority during the time he was not supervising Ingram. For example, Albuquerque criticizes Barton’s supervision of a temporary BHA employee during the time he was not supervising the BHA manager. 

“I am being set up here,” he said.  

Barton said Albuquerque got another point entirely backwards. While she says he “repeatedly resisted” her advice to bring in the Alameda County Housing Authority to figure out what operational changes needed to take place, he says, “Actually, I had been in constant contact with Alameda County Housing Authority. I felt that was our backup.” 

Barton says that today, rather than going the very expensive route of hiring an outside consulting agency to run BHA—which is the city manager/city attorney’s plan—the Housing Authority of the County of Alameda should be invited to set up an office in Berkeley and run the agency. That would preserve the housing vouchers in Berkeley. 

Barton said he finds it “very offensive” that the city manager and city attorney made the decision to go the route of hiring the outside agency without consulting him—the BHA staff is being laid off and placed in jobs elsewhere in the city and a private agency is being hired to run BHA along with Ingram.  

“Even though it’s late in the day, I still strongly recommend that approach,” Barton said. 

Barton and HUD directives 

Among Albuquerque’s criticisms of Barton was that “Mr. Barton was … dismissive of HUD’s ability to provide assistance.”  

Barton responds: “If I were to pick out an error of mine, it was following the directions of HUD as long as I did.”  

Barton cites a number of instances in which he said HUD was responsible for creating problems rather than solving them.  

One example of confusion within HUD was around a loan. There were maintenance problems in the 75 public housing units, some dating back to when they were built. BHA needed $1.4 million for repairs and arranged to borrow it from HUD, based on Community Development Block Grant funds the city gets from HUD. (The manager at the time was a former HUD official.) 

“Rather to my amazement, the people in the regional HUD office complained that [the manager] had gotten the loan from the other part of the HUD without their authorization and at various times ordered us to stop work.” 

Another example of a HUD-created problem was that around 2003 HUD started cutting back administrative payments to the Housing Authority and its payments for public housing. BHA was cut from a staff of 19 to 13 people. 

“That was definitely a mistake,” Barton said. “I should have said no, we can’t cut staff.”  

Also, at one point, while the housing authority was dealing with line staff problems and with changing BHA management, “HUD was going through constant reorganizations and they were constantly sending out new people to review the housing authority and telling us to do different things.” 

At one point, HUD sent out a consultant team that decided that what was needed was to do “interim” recertifications of housing clients, which they attempted to do in a couple of weekends, Barton said. The result was “a massive diversion of staff time,” with incomplete results.  

“If HUD had been trying to actively sabotage the Housing Authority, they couldn’t have done better than what their help was,” he said. 

Call for investigation 

Barton reiterated his call for an independent inquiry into the office of the city attorney. 

“The memo is just an example of the “kind of casual attack—an unsubstantiated attack—which is an example of how city staff is treated day in and day out by the city attorney,” he said. “Privately, city staff and department directors talk about how unusual it is to be in a city where the attorney’s office treats staff as the enemy on a routine basis.”  

This has a fundamental impact on the work of city staff, Barton said. 

When the city attorney’s office is regularly “insulting, abrupt and dismissive,” that means staff avoids seeking needed advice, Barton said. “This only serves to enforce the view [of city attorney staff] that staff are incompetent and resistant to their advice, thus creating a vicious circle of noncooperation. 

“This internal situation in Berkeley has festered for years and nothing’s been done about it,” he said.