Bryant Saunders, who took over as Section 8 director for the Durham Housing Authority in 2007, has been fired, the Herald-Sun reports (registration required). In an interview with the paper last week–and in an e-mail memo sent to City Council–Saunders claimed he had been fired in retaliation for his attempts to fire a subordinate:
“It became a situation where somebody had to be thrown under the bus, somebody had to own some of the reasons,” Saunders said in an interview earlier this week, referring to the subordinate’s belated ouster. “She just couldn’t be hidden any longer. The documentation had become mountainous.”
At a City Council work session held one week after Saunders’ firing, James Whitcomb, Regional Director for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, insisted that DHA’s handling of Section 8, not DHA itself, was troubled, and that the program was now ‘looking pretty good.” Whitcomb did not mention Saunders’ firing at that meeting.
