New housing chief has his work cut out for him

The incoming head of Charlottesville’s public housing agency has never strayed very far from the place he knows best.
As Albemarle County native Randy Bickers takes over as the new executive director of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority, he will return to a place that he has already worked for in an area he’s lived in his entire life — something that, he says, gives him a clear advantage in working through the odds and ends of the city’s public housing sites.
“I think I understand the challenges of the job,” said Bickers, who served as the housing authority’s deputy director from August 2007 until last summer. Most recently he was the fiscal director for the Region Ten Community Services Board.

When the 43-year-old Bickers officially starts as executive director Wednesday — the fourth head to run the agency in the past 10 years — he said he will face a host of tasks and challenges to turn the housing authority around, fill roughly 30 vacancies at the sites’ 376 units and to begin a long redevelopment process of the aging neighborhoods.
Jason Halbert, chairman of the authority’s Board of Commissioners, said Bickers was one of two people interviewed for the position after the previous executive director, Noah Schwartz, resigned in December.
“He knows what the issues are and he’s going to tackle them right away,” Halbert said of Bickers. “We’re getting ready to turn a corner, so to speak, to really improve things.”
And Bickers, who will start with a salary of $92,500 and have an initial contract of three years, conceded that there are many issues to resolve. The housing authority has been listed as “troubled” by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for several years because of its sites’ physical conditions.
“That’s certainly one of our biggest challenges,” Bickers said.

Mayor Dave Norris, who also heads the authority’s redevelopment committee, added, “The neighborhoods need a real boost.”
Norris said that Bickers’ good rapport with the housing authority’s existing staff and residents will make it easier to lead the agency out of troubled waters.
“I think it was the smoothest transition that the housing authority has had in the last 10 years,” Norris said. “It’s not an easy job.”
City Councilor Holly Edwards said some of the trust issues that have prevailed over the years have been a direct result of a lack of consistent leadership within the housing authority.

Bickers agreed, saying constant turnover makes it difficult to maintain focus, but he said the recent round of rumors and fears have also stemmed from the idea of redeveloping most of the aging public housing units.
Along with resident engagement efforts that have already begun, once the planning process begins and designs are drawn up for what the sites will look like, Bickers said that might help alleviate some residents’ concerns.
“I think there’s still a lot of fear out there,” he said.

But, Edwards also said that running such a complicated agency is no simple task — though the City Council to some extent governs what actions the agency takes, she said, there are a slew of federal regulations that must be followed.
“It’s just a very complex job,” Edwards said.
She added that Bickers’ background in finance — he graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in accounting — will allow him to keep the agency’s books straight at a time when local governments and agencies find themselves having more and more unfunded mandates.
“He knows how to follow the money,” Edwards said.

As for where the housing authority and how far along redevelopment will be at his contract’s end, Bickers said he couldn’t say. But he says he does know one thing — pending that the Board of Commissioners would agree to it, he hopes to stay on as executive director longer than the first stretch that begins this week.
“I certainly don’t see this as a three-year investment,” Bickers said.