Local & State Headlines

CED leader leaving city

• Albany city officials must find a replacement for one of their most effective department heads.

Carlton Fletcher

ALBANY — Ask Alfred Lott about the city of Albany’s Community and Economic Development Director Jennifer Clark, and the city manager tells a story.

“Right after I got here, I received a package from HUD’s (the Department of Housing and Urban Development) regional office in Atlanta,” Lott said. “It was a document about 50 pages long that listed concerns HUD had about our programs here. It took me two hours just to read through it and understand it.

“When Jennifer Clark showed up about two weeks later, I gave her a few days to settle in, then I told her one of her priorities was to develop a professional working relationship with the HUD regional office. And I told her I wanted the issues that were outlined in that packet gone.”

Less than a year later, Lott recalls, Albany’s problems with HUD were history.

“We were in jeopardy of losing HUD funding due to previous mismanagement,” Lott said. “Jennifer fixed it.”

Ask Assistant City Manager James Taylor about Clark, and he too has a ready answer.

“Jennifer is one of, if not the, most well-trained, capable persons that I know,” Taylor says.

Ward 3 City Commissioner Morris Gurr offers similar sentiments.

“Jennifer was a godsend to us,” he said. “We were in trouble in (Community and Economic Development), and she did a miraculous job of turning that department around.”

Unfortunately for the folks at city hall — and, obviously, for the citizens of Albany as well — the aforementioned city leaders’ assessment of Clark comes at a time when she is preparing to leave the city to become Director of Community Development for the city of Independence, Mo. Her last full day on the job here is Friday, and she, husband Shawn, and kids Ariel, 8, and Ian, 6, will take off the next week for Middle America.

The job change is a new, and more lucrative, challenge for Clark, but it’s also a homecoming of sorts. Born and raised in St. Louis, she and her family will be moving back to within easy driving distance of family members eager for more frequent visits.

“I saw an advertisement for the job and thought it was interesting,” Clark, 39, said of the Independence position. “I threw my name in the hat not really expecting to be considered. But they were looking to make a change there, and the more I talked with them, the more it seemed like a good fit.

“Obviously, the step up and the finances were a part of it, but it also gives my family an opportunity to move much closer to mine and Shawn’s parents. This is a daunting challenge for me, but it brings me full-circle back to being a generalist in housing development.”

After earning a degree in sociology at Drury College in Springfield, Mo., Clark worked for seven years in planning for the city of Longview, Texas. She was tabbed by the city of Kilgore, Texas, to be its director of Neighborhood Housing Development, a position she held for three years before leaving the business world to concentrate on raising Ariel and Ian.

After working as a private consultant for five years, the family moved to Houston, where Clark worked for Housing Finance Corp., a “quasi- governmental agency” that oversaw housing matters over a 20-jurisdiction area.

Then hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit, and the Clarks decided to make a change.

“I started work (in Albany) in January of 2006,” Clark said. “Not long after being on the job I was presented documentation showing the city had 15 monitoring findings from HUD that had to be addressed immediately. The norm is one or two findings.

“We were in an environment with an administration in D.C. where funds were shrinking. Funding was drying up, but the needs in the city were not changing. It was a matter of sitting down and looking at the process, finding out just what we had to do to deal with each problem. Fortunately, the staff worked hard with me to get these things taken care of.”

Clark said another priority for her was engaging the citizens in Albany in determining how HUD funds would be spent. Before she arrived, she said, 35 citizens had responded to Community and Economic Development’s request for input on HUD spending. Last year that number topped 100.

“We found that the best way to get responses from the community was to go to them,” Clark said. “Rather than have folks come to the government center (downtown) or to our offices, we held meetings in the neighborhoods of the people most affected.”

Clark also pushed city officials to allow her department to sell the hundreds of properties that the city owned, many that were left vacant after floods in 1994 and 1998. Of the “more than 1,000 properties,” some 400 were deemed uninhabitable by FEMA, 300 have been sold and are under development and around 300 more are under contract.

“Jennifer has been outstanding in dealing with economic development issues,” Gurr said. “By selling hundreds of properties that the city owned, she reduced our maintenance concerns and put the properties back on the tax roles.”

As she prepares to head west, Clark says she’s pleased with the progress her department made in the almost 2 1/2 years she was in Albany.

“We established a good base,” she said. “While I’m one of those persons who prefers to see dirt flying, I think we’ve laid the groundwork for continued economic development in the city. I think in the 2010 census, you’ll see some dramatic changes in the substandard housing numbers.

“What I hope now is that someone will come in here and take what we’ve done and run with it.”

Taylor said housing expert Thelma Watson is expected to run the CED office on an interim basis while the city conducts a search to find a replacement for Clark. But he admits that doing that might be tough.

“Any time you lose a person of this caliber, it’s a big loss,” Taylor said. “But we all know in our hearts that this is the right thing for Jennifer to do. We respect and honor her wishes, but we will miss her incredibly.”

Lott echoed those sentiments.

“Jennifer Clark is one of the top three department directors I have here, and I have some real good ones,” he said. “I don’t know that there’s another person out there like her for us, but that’s what we’ll be looking for. We’re going to miss her, but I think we all are happy that she’s getting this opportunity to go home.”

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