The Roving Activist’s Blog

Here is my official write-up of the call from the assistant to Kim Kendrick, Assistant Secretary of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

I got the Call – But it was the same old story
On October 31st, I received a message from Deandra Johnson, the assistant to Kim Kendrick, Assistant Secretary of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In the message, she stated that she wanted to touch bases with me regarding the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that Kim spoke of. According to Ms. Johnson, the FOIA request has not been sent out yet. It is taking longer than they thought it would, but they have not forgotten about us.

I got the message less than ten minutes after it was sent, but as Ms. Johnson stated in her message, she will be out of the office until Wednesday, November 7th. She left her phone number and e-mail address.

My thoughts about the matter are these: Why is it taking so long to get this information? Why would it take a FOIA request to get information that, in my view, one would simply ask for? After all, these are Kim’s colleagues! More important, Secretary Jackson promised ADAPT the information and charged Kim Kendrick with getting the information to ADAPT. Both the Secretary, and Ms. Kendrick are well aware of what happens when they break promises to ADAPT. If they want us to back off, it would behoove them to keep their promise! Perhaps, Secretary Jackson needs to either get the information himself or get serious about leaning on Kim, so that she can get serious about leaning on whomever within HUD who has the information. I, personally, cannot help but think that HUD is stalling and has no intentions of getting the information to ADAPT.

Disheartening, eh? But the saga continues. HUD hasn’t seen or heard the last of ADAPT!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Activism, ADAPT, HUD and Access Across America, Rochester. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.