The Metro Audit Committee decided in September to conduct a financial audit of the Office of Homeless Services (OHS).
An overflow room was set up to accommodate all the people that were interested in this meeting, including those called in to testify during the public hearing, which was limited to eight people, each allowed to speak for two minutes.
The audit request was submitted by Councilmember Ginny Welsch. The following is a summary of her justification for an audit (copied and pasted from her letter to the Audit Committee):
“Since the creation of the office, serious questions have been raised regarding the leadership of OHS Director April Calvin, and numerous documented examples of mismanagement have been brought forth, including but not limited to:
- Financial mismanagement and/or potential fraud related to expenditures of both federal ARP and Metro funds as well as contract compliance;
- Lack of oversight of Metro facilities, including Strobel House, resulting in harm to residents and staff opening Metro to liability;
- Staffing and hiring mismanagement;
- Overall mismanagement resulted in the failure to improve housing outcomes despite a massive influx of federal and Metro dollars, and failure to deliver on its chartered obligations to coordinate Nashville’s homelessness response through shelter management, outreach, planning council support, and maintaining an inventory of third-party service providers.”
More specifically, Welsch claims that local journalists and advocates have reported $3.2 million in suspected financial irregularities including:
- $569,000 in improper invoicing to Depaul USA, which is the contractor that runs Strobel House together with OHS;
- $565,000 in improper use from Metro’s Landlord Engagement funds;
- $130,000 in charges on a single department credit card;
- $2 million of temporary federal funds used for permanent positions, which Welsch states would create “a future ‘funding cliff’ that will require an injection of Metro general budget funds.”
Welsch’s letter also points to other finance questions, some of them I would consider administrative moves that may create more transparency once corrected. Other claims include:
- Unsustainable staffing structures, including when running Metro’s cold weather shelter, and circumvention of the Metro HR hiring policies;
- Lack of transparency surrounding safety incidents at Strobel House; and
- “Operational collapse despite massive funding increases,” in which Welsch points to
- The lack of housing placement increases despite an increase in millions of dollars in investments.
- 80 non-permanent beds kept empty for a year.
- A lack of timely referrals from OHS that resulted in additional units and services being left unused for periods of time.
- Etc.
Both Welsch and OHS Director April Calvin were given five minutes to make statements.
Welsch voiced concerns about OHS and also about the federal administration that could potentially claw back money, as she phrased it. She ended her argument stating that “an audit would assure everyone that these monies have actually been spent in the way that they are required to be spent.”
Calvin fought hard to avoid an audit, even bringing in people from Strobel House and the temporary shelter on Wallace Road to testify on behalf of the OHS (a move that can be seen as controversial in a trauma-informed environment).
“OHS is pretty much an open book,” Calvin said in her statement. “Managing our funds and contracting obligations is very important to us. We take that seriously, and we see the impact of the work on the 3,800 individual faces that we helped house within the last two years.”
Calvin said “in the last two years, our office has kind of held the line under the current housing pressures that we’ve had. We’ve held the line at 2.4 percent of an increase, and cities our size that we like to look to as model cities had an increase of 36 percent, 19 percent, 14 percent.”
Vice Mayor Angie Henderson compared the request to a similar situation the Audit Committee faced in August when determining to move forward with an audit of the office of the Assessor of Property.
“Sometimes when there is just a broad community concern around something conducting an audit allays those concerns,” Henderson said, adding that she was trying to find a way to be constructive and allay those concerns “because this is a space in government that is very fraught with a whole lot of community partners, a lot of different opinions. It’s a challenging space to work in.”
At one point, Henderson said she had heard concerns from multiple council members about OHS, not just Welsch. Eventually Henderson made the motion to add an audit to Metro’s audit plan “scoped specifically to the financial items elevated, I guess by Ms. Welsch, but not that that precludes anything adjacent or determined by that process.”
While I welcome an internal audit, it is not a moment to celebrate. It does not feel right that we had to get to this point. I want to reiterate that all this contention points to a lack of leadership, which ultimately starts and ends with the Mayor’s Office.
I publicly criticized OHS leadership, but have retreated somewhat in the past few months, as other people stepped up and paid more attention. My main concern, however, remains. I worry that we are not helping as many people as we should and that the city is not applying a Housing First approach as they claim to do.
Mayor Freddie O’Connell and his representatives have heard enough concerns from nonprofits, neighborhoods and council members to figure out that there are leadership issues at OHS.
I want to outline two of the issues I struggle with:
- The underutilization of resources that could move people to housing quicker; and
- The propaganda efforts that trump transparent data analysis to improve the current homelessness system.
Here is an example to support my first claim. OHS leadership stated in a public meeting in summer of 2024 that they had been keeping 80 beds at a temporary shelter location open for their next encampment closure. Those beds (actually 80 motel rooms) were ultimately unoccupied for one year. OHS defended that move saying they did not pay for those beds.
In a functioning system, those temporary units should have served an estimated 200 people, even after taking into account that it should have taken no more than three-to-four months to correct an administrative mistake OHS made in the contract management of that property.
During winter months, OHS served up to 300-plus people at Metro’s cold weather shelter. Imagine if those beds had been used during that time. This is just one example of why I have been outspoken about Metro’s current approach to homelessness.
Having said that, I also want to be clear that the criticism OHS receives does not negate the great services a lot of people are getting through the nonprofits that contract with OHS to do the work of actually housing people. I just believe more people should have been served in a more efficient and person-centered approach.
OHS correctly states that there have been thousands of people housed in the past couple of years. But OHS also creates talking points and adjusts data presentations to cover up the full picture of what’s been happening.
Since the audit request, OHS has taken to presenting their numbers over the past two years because they clearly look better that way. I have called this approach propaganda. The data is what it is, but here are options to look at it in different ways. Per the Point-in-Time Count, a one-day snapshot conducted every year in January, Nashville has seen the following changes since the city invested millions more in federal and local dollars toward homelessness.
Looking at that from a two-year perspective, which is what OHS is now doing:
- 2023-2025: 3,868 people housed; change in homelessness: +2.4 percent increase.
- 2022-2024: 3,767 people housed; change in homelessness: +9.2 percent increase.
And looking at the increase in homelessness from 2022 to 2025: +13.8 percent.
My point is that when Metro all of a sudden changes how it presents data to make OHS look good, it is missing the mark and reeks of propaganda rather than a transparent and open communication process focused on how we, as a community, can improve outcomes.
To be fair, OHS has no control over how many people lose their housing. But, with the increase of investments directly toward a housing-first-oriented system, I would expect the output — or housing placements — to be higher than they currently are. Which leads to the many questions that I still receive from the community: where is the money going?
For one, the fact that people still come to me rather than go to OHS — which many do in a secretive manner — is not a good sign. But I do understand why. The fear of retaliation from OHS leadership is real, a fact I can attest to.
We also need to recognize that housing placements are mostly done by partner agencies, not by OHS itself. OHS is supposed to be the coordination entity that helps build a system where people receive referrals to support services and to housing as quickly as possible (see my comments above about keeping 80 shelter units open even though money was available). I believe most OHS staff are talented enough to implement solutions to such a dilemma when leadership steps out of the way.
Which makes me wonder … if we were to shave away the bloated bureaucracy that Metro has been creating around homelessness since 2022, and if we were to shift some of these millions that paid for administrative costs at OHS toward housing people (rent assistance and support services at housing complexes that could function similarly to Strobel House, etc.), would we realize that OHS is not doing as much as it could?
I don’t know the answer.
An internal audit may very well prove that OHS is a wonderfully effective and efficient entity. I truly hope that’s the case. While I do not like the way OHS’ leadership functions, I admire some of their dedicated staff. And I certainly support many of the nonprofits that are contracting with OHS and do the hard work of housing people.
But even if the internal audit — hopefully — finds that all is as it should be, what remains is still a lack of transparency and practically no oversight of OHS from the Mayor’s Office, which has backfired and has clearly harmed OHS, no matter how you look at it.
Judith Tackett is a longtime homelessness expert and advocates for housing-focused, person-centered solutions. Opinions in this column are her own.