The board of the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority approved a $150,000 raise for their president and CEO Charles Hillman earlier this year.
Hillman was hired as CEO at $185,000 a year in 2010. The CMHA board gave him several large increases in pay over the last few years, raising his pay to $400,000. The board raised it again this year to $550,000 per year.
That amount makes Hillman the highest paid lead of any housing authority in the country. He also gets other benefits like bonuses and travel expenses.
CMHA Board President James Ervin said Hillman has earned those increases, because he changed how the department does business by bringing in funds in non-traditional ways.
"Moving from our traditional model to being more proactive. How do we develop affordable housing, rather than just maintaining it, and how do we redevelop communities rather than just house people," Ervin said.
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Ervin said Hillman's leadership has helped the housing authority leverage their annual budget of about $800 million in an innovative way, including issuing bonds to purchase housing developments or build new ones.
CMHA can charge market-rate rents for some tenants to bring cash in, and then use those market rates to help subsidize the cost for people who can't afford to pay top dollar, and pay for things like higher executive salaries to retain the staff that make the programs possible.
"CMHA’s additional revenue comes from multiple sources including, management fees, portions of rent from market rate/mixed-income properties/rents, and other sourcing structures. Rent is the primary sources of revenue from these properties," Ervin said.
Ervin said other housing authorities are making strategic investments, development projects and creating additional revenue, too. But, he said, "none are or have been, yet, as creative and transformative as CMHA. He said the "rapid" growth of CMHA's housing stock, and issuing bonds to create projects makes CMHA a "leader" in the field.
"The vast majority of (public housing authorities) across this country are not doing what CMHA does," Ervin said.
Ervin said the strategy leads to economic impacts that help the region.
Ervin said the board used a consulting firm to set Hillman's salary. The most recent report shows the firm did not compare Hillman's pay to CEOs of other housing authorities, who all make less than Hillman.
The firm instead compared his pay to other nonprofits. Most of the compared organizations offered CEOs pay between $300,000 and $750,000, but they also compared him to an organization that pays their CEO more than $2 million.
CMHA's Chief Financial Officer Tom Williamson was the 19th highest paid housing authority executive in the country in 2022 at $361,000 a year — that's out of the 7,400 salaries tracked by HUD. Another official with CMHA is the 36th highest paid at $326,000 a year.
Ervin said Hillman's pay is warranted.
"When he talks about our mixed income strategy, using market rate, what we're doing with the housing choice voucher program, it is the culmination of what we're doing is that collective effort is what I refer to as our innovative strategies," Ervin said.
Hillman is paid more than the person in charge of the New York City housing authority, which is the country's largest, and the voucher program offers residents more than four times the amount of vouchers offered by CMHA.
New York City also has about about 160,000 housing units, while CMHA owns 6,000. But the CEO of the housing authority in New York City is paid nearly $200,000 less than Hillman. Hillman's latest raise came during a time when CMHA privatized the management of the voucher program, handing duties to another company, the multi-national corporation CGI.
WOSU spoke with several mothers who were waiting outside of CGI's downtown Columbus office on High Street in order to correct mistakes the agency made with their paperwork.
RELATED: CMHA walks back statements that they're cutting management firm to handle housing vouchers
The women spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to protect their access to housing. They were all shocked that the person in charge of CMHA received a raise while company the organization handed operations off to is failing them.
"This is a disgrace. This is worse than standing in the sandwich line waiting for a sandwich," one woman said.
"We've got people down here losing their houses because someone didn't sign a piece of paper," another woman said.
The complaints aren't just anecdotal. Federal investigators with HUD found CMHA didn't provide the proper oversight of its contractor and other problems. Hillman wouldn't discuss his pay, and said it's set by the board.
Check in Tuesday to hear more about how CMHA's experiment with privatization is going. CMHA told reporters in May the experiment with CGI will come to an end next spring. Now, they're not so sure.
