Transcript

I am Carol Jones Gilbert, um, chief Executive Officer of the Palm Beach County Housing Authority in West Palm Beach, Florida. We have gotten a lot more into the online portals, like the rent cafe. We've done the intakes, interims, research, rafta. That's what has changed a lot for us from last year. One of our big things was compliance and making sure that the documents were consistent. One of the things, we were under a corrective action plan with hud, and one of the things that I told him that we would use to cure some of those issues was that we were going to be doing things in the portal because the portal ensures that all the documents are consistent. They're all signed, they're all dated. And that has helped us. And we've seen that because we just finished our internal audit and we had less findings than we had the year before. You know, it is such a challenging environment right now. And so basically just trying to keep my staff trained, keep us compliant, just how do we manage what we can manage to the best of our ability? How do we better utilize technology to help us do that? So that's one thing that Yardi has emphasized at this forum and that we are looking at, you know, and then also how do we reduce our reliance on the federal funding? And so that's what we're looking at. Over the next three to five years, we have branched out into outside property management for firms. And so we took on a 28 unit property that we manage for the city. 'cause what we know that we do well is property management. You know, that's what housing authorities do. Um, we are working with our county and we will be property managing a La Quinta hotel that they are converting into a single room occupancy. So we will be providing the property management for that property. So we're just kind of testing our wings and kind of expanding and exploring what else can we do and how do we leverage what we do. Well, You know what? We started, I think COVID made us really think differently. Some of the things that we do, and I'm really proud of this, we have a quiet room. You know, my, my team came to me and they said, we're going in our car taking a nap at lunchtime and if we have to run our cars that have air. So I I, they were like, can we have a quiet room? I said, okay, I'll give you a budget. You design it, you tell me what you want in it. And so they did. And so we have these massaging lounge chairs. They, they're heated. You can go in there, there's a little waterfall, there's blackout curtains, you know, and so they can go in there at any time, you know, I'm like, if you need to rest or you need to unplug, just go in there. All we wanna do is make sure you get it work done. I had staff that they were like, we have food challenges. So we put in a vending machine and it is subsidized. Everything in there is 50% of what the price it costs us to get it. So you can get a soda for a quarter, you can get a bag of chips for a quarter, you know, because we want people to be able to have stuff to eat, to drink. We looked at, in our fitness center, we have two of the mirrors. 'cause we are like, we want you to be able to take, if you want to take bar lessons, if you want to take kickboxing, if you want to take, you know, we put the mirror in there so people can stay fit. So we try to look at, you know, how do we incentivize, how do we encourage our staff to stay motivated, to stay engaged? You know, and it's not just seeing them as, okay, I need those research done. I need those interims done. But how do I see you as a person? I wanna make sure you're trained. I wanna make sure you're equipped to do the job that you have to do. But I also wanna make sure that you're happy and that you know, you enjoy coming to work.