Glover May Soon Resign from AHA
(APN) ATLANTA — Renee Glover, the CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority who presided over the demolition and destruction of nearly all of Atlanta’s public housing, may soon resign from AHA, Atlanta Progressive News has learned.
One member of AHA’s Board of Commissioners told APN they were expecting Glover to have resigned at a Board meeting last week and that they were pressuring Glover to resign.
Then, late last week, another source–a Buckhead source–also said they were expecting Glover to resign within the next few days.
Both expected that Glover would go to work for former Mayor Shirley Franklin, who, as previously reported by APN, is now CEO of a new entity called Purpose Built Communities. The goal of PBC is to spread the model of public housing demolitions and charter schools to other cities.
APN attended the Board meeting on Wednesday, September 28, 2011.
There, the Board called the meeting to order and almost immediately went into Executive Session to discuss personnel matters. Presumably, they were discussing Glover.
At a previous AHA Board meeting attended by APN, Glover took part in the executive session, suggesting, again, that Glover did not attend Wednesday’s back-room discussion because she was the subject of the discussion.
After the Board came out of executive session, Chair Cecil Phillips announced that the Vice Chair, Justine Boyd, would run the meeting while Phillips had a conversation with Ms. Glover in the hallway.
As previously reported by APN, at least three Board members–James Allen, Wayne Jones, and Dan Halpern–are not pleased with Glover, who they have said is unresponsive, arrogant, and resistant to oversight.
Mayor Kasim Reed–who one source told APN is estranged from Franklin–is also not a fan of Glover.
Dan Halpern, the AHA Board member who seems to be taking the lead on criticizing Glover, was a top campaign advisor to Reed in 2009.
Wednesday’s meeting agenda was also supposed to include the election of a new Board Chair and Vice Chair, but those items, along with others, were postponed, and the Board only voted on a few items on the agenda.
Previously, the AHA Board cut the budget of Alisias, Glover’s right-hand PR firm and think tank which had put a happy face on public housing demolitions. Alisias’s budget was by several hundred thousand dollars, to 85,000 dollars per year.
Rick White, CEO of Alisias, was not present at Wednesday’s Board meeting, and APN was told that his role at AHA has significantly declined.
Previously, APN reported that Glover was once being considered for Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent, but that effort appears to have been squashed. Glover denied that she was interested in the job.
More recently, media outlets in Chicago reported that Glover was being considered for a role in leading a public housing agency there, something she also denied.
More than once, Glover has also been said to have been considered as a short list candidate for Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, although that never materialized as well, after numerous low-income housing advocates raised concerns.
(END / 2011)