Lets Clear up a few facts about tonights meeting

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   I want to thank Mr. Laubach for an excellent meeting tonight it was informative and gave the citizens a Chance to interact both with Council and City Employees.
A few things need to be cleared up concerning tonights meeting:

1)  Mr Smith continually insisted that the Middletown Section 8 Program has always had 1662 Vouchers since day one.  Even with attempts to question him on this figure he insisted it was always 1662.

The MPHA has been in existence since about 1973.  The Section 8 program had 767 Section 8 vouchers in 2000.  It was not until 2007 that the Vouchers had ballooned to 1662.  This is per the Cities own records.

2)  Several Section 8 Landlords were present in this meeting basically defending the program.  Mr. Tracy stated that there were 3 cities in Ohio that administered their own programs,  Middletown, Parma and Marietta. 

While Middletown and Parma do indeed administer their own programs or hire an outside agency to do it, Marietta, Ohio's program is administered by the Washington-Morgan Community Action serving all of Washington and Morgan Counties Ohio, http://www.wmcap.org/index.html .

3)  Mr. Tracy further stated that you had to be a Middletown resident to get a voucher in Middletown, then why does the Feb. 2010 Consoc report list 225 non-residents as being on the waiting list.

4)  One of the Landlords further stated he would rather have Section 8 tenants than Private citizens because he makes more money.  And Section 8 tenants don't tear up the property like private citizens.

HUD pays:
0 bedrooms $473.00
1 bedroom   $560.00
2 bedrooms $726.00
3 bedrooms $972.00
4 bedrooms $1009.00

Not bad considering the cost of some of these houses in Middletown.  Personally I took much of this talk as them trying to protect their turf at the expense of Middletown.

5)  Mr. Tracy further tried to compare Butler Counties vouchers and housing program to Middletown's numbers which was ridicules as you are not comparing apples to apples.  You are comparing Butler County with about 1800 units I believe was the number that Tracy used and a population of 350,000 people and Middletown's 3600 vouchers and public housing units and 50000 residents.  Hardly seems to me to be an apples and apples comparison as he stated.

6)  It was stated that the number of children in Section 8 and the school system is "minuscule".  If you take Consoc's number of 2.5 people per voucher and do the math:  2.5 x 1662 = 4155.  What does everyone think that 3 adults are living on each Voucher and still getting under the fact that you must make 30% of the Median income for the Cinci area to qualify for a voucher.....come on.  A good portion of these people are children.

Bottom line folks is that these programs need to be reduced.  No one expects them to be done away with, but for a city this size and the problems that it has financially, infrastructural and image wise the Public housing situation needs to be dealt with as does the poverty level.  

The city will not recover with a poverty rate of 25% as businesses will not locate to a city this size with a poverty rate this high.  We can continue to pretend these issues don't matter as some did tonight.  If that is your choice then be prepared for a city in continual decline until it is beyond reviving.