La Joya Housing Authority gets new director, chair

The habitually-troubled La Joya Housing Authority is once again under new management.

La Joya Housing Authority commissioners approved a management and operations agreement with the Mission Housing Authority in April, which means that organization and its staff are going to run the show in La Joya.

The La Joya Housing Authority had been operating under a similar arrangement with the Kenedy Housing Authority before its board of commissioners chose not to renew that entity’s contract in March.

That’s not the only leadership change at the La Joya Housing Authority.

Last month La Joya Mayor Isidro Casanova chose not to reappoint Jaime Gaitan, the board of commissioners’ chair, back to his seat on the body.

Instead, he filled the vacant position his wife, Cindy Casanova.

The board voted Monday to name as chair Guadalupe “Lupita” Cantu, who’s married to La Joya Councilman Enrique “Henry” Cantu. It voted Roel Valdez vice chair.

Cantu largely didn’t comment on the authority’s progress during the Kenedy Housing Authority’s one and a half year tenure managing the entity after Monday’s meeting.

“I didn’t see anything back then,” she said.

Valdez stood beside Cantu while she answered questions and he frequently interjected to answer or decline to answer before she could respond.

“I’m new, I’m learning. We’re moving into a positive direction, that’s all that I can say,” Valdez said after the Progress Times asked Cantu questions about the board’s reorganization.

Cantu mentioned that Gaitan had served as chair, but when the Progress Times asked for Gaitan’s first name, Valdez again interjected.

“I mean I’m done for the night, I have no other answers. Ms. Cantu?” he said.

“Well, I can talk to Ms. Cantu, right?” the Progress Times replied.

“Well, it’s up to her, if she wants to,” Valdez said.

Cantu said she wasn’t sure that she’d be able to answer any questions.

The conversation ended shortly thereafter, at the insistence of Valdez; Cantu was his ride home and he was ready to leave.

Individuals not on the board proved more informative about recent events at the authority.

According to Gaitan, the board had a meeting sometime in early March where it was supposed to discuss the Kenedy authority’s management contract. He couldn’t make it, but he says he talked to other commissioners who said they’d table the item till the board’s next meeting so he could participate.

That didn’t happen, Gaitan said, and the board voted to part ways with Kenedy Housing Authority while he wasn’t present.

Gaitan says after the meeting he called Isidro Casanova to talk about that decision and found out the mayor had decided not to put him back on the board because he’d moved to Peñitas, which Gaitan says shouldn’t have barred him from serving.

Isidro Casanova says there’s also “unanswered questions” at the authority that he’s confident his spouse will help address.

“I know my wife. She’s a go-getter and she’ll get to the bottom of things,” he said.

Isidro Casanova also described the board’s motivation for replacing the Kenedy Housing Authority and its executive director, Cristi LaJeunesse.

“The other board members, they were not satisfied with the way she was running things,” he said. “They would very rarely have meetings. So, they said ‘You know what, we have no contact with her, she was never around,’ so they decided to take a different route.”

LaJeunesse said Wednesday that she and her staff met the obligations of their contract, and both she and Gaitan said they’d labored diligently to bring an organization crippled by corruption back from the brink.

They said they’d hoped to keep up the effort.

“I worked really hard in the last two years, along with the director, to try to get that authority back on its feet,” said Gaitan. “Because for the past four, six years that authority has been dragged to the ground, through the mud. They were stealing money from it, they were giving contracts left and right with people that weren’t supposed to have contracts. So we fixed all that.”

Interim Executive Director Arnold Padilla, who’s been executive director at the Mission Housing Authority since 2022, told his La Joya board Monday about a particularly significant unanswered question: he says since coming onboard last week he’s discovered almost $70,000 worth of payments to the Kenedy Housing Authority that completely lack documentation.

“We are following up on some of those payments. I mean, I do not have an answer,” he said. “There were some payments that went out in the month of March for which we don’t have a clear indication as to what they were for. So our objective is to determine what those payments were for, what services were rendered or what products were bought with those funds so that we can identify them from our end, as far as acceptable expenses.”

Reading out copies of invoices in an interview with the Progress Times Wednesday, LaJeunesse confidently detailed about $50,000 worth of payments for labor she says were totally above board and signed off on by the commission in March.

“And they have every check, and the documentation was behind each check. So if they’re saying otherwise, that is just them playing games,” she said.

LaJeunesse, who has a long history of working with the La Joya Housing Authority, says paperwork has gone missing at the institution before. She says after she resigned as the authority’s executive director in 2019 someone went in the office and shredded all the financial information she left behind.

“I mean, it was just a joke,” she said.

LaJeunesse’s last day at the La Joya Housing authority was March 30.

The Mission Housing Authority’s board approved its side of the La Joya Housing Authority on April 23, and after that Padilla went to work trying to figure out how the operation works.

“We’re gonna come in,” he said. “We’re gonna help them make sure their policies and procedures are correct. Their procurements are correct. Go back and look at their financial situation, make sure that it’s a financial situation. Do what we need to do to stabilize their assets.”

Put simply, Padilla says the authority’s physical assets need attention. Sidewalks are broken, trees are overgrown, units are decrepit.

Padilla says the authority lacks cash reserves to begin tackling those issues.

“There’s a lot that needs attention,” he said. “We’re here to assist and analyze the assets as a whole. Determine their current condition and what it’s gonna take from a funding source to get them up to a standard that is acceptable.”

LaJeunesse doesn’t disagree that there’s a lot to be done at the La Joya Housing Authority. She says Padilla’s a pro who’ll lend a steady hand to the outfit — though LaJeunesse felt she was already accomplishing as much herself.

Politics, LaJeunesse suspects, derailed a housing authority that was finally on the right track after years of being on the wrong track.

“Do I think we would have made a big difference given another year?” she said. “Absolutely.”

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