Mayor Chris Watts seeks removal of two Denton Housing Authority board members

Denton Mayor Chris Watts held a hearing Thursday at City Hall seeking to remove Jesse Davis and Birdia Johnson from the Denton Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, accusing them of inefficiency. Former City Council members Davis and Johnson, who serve as the vice chair and board chair, were appointed by then-Mayor Gerard Hudspeth. The mayor appoints the five commissioners to the DHA board. Board members serve two-year terms and act as the primary relationship between the city and the housing authority. They can be removed by the mayor for inefficiency, neglect of duty or misconduct, according to the Texas Local Government Code. Formed in 1970, the Denton Housing Authority collects and distributes tax funds for housing under the authority of state and federal law, including rules and regulations from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In the Oct. 15 charge letters, Watts alleges both Davis and Johnson have failed to structure housing projects to achieve the lowest possible rates, operated projects for profit or excess return, diverted project revenue to non-housing purposes, offered excessive compensation increases for staff inconsistent with DHA’s mission, failed to cooperate with the city and obstructed his appointments of new commissioners. Watts also alleges a lack of transparency from Davis and Johnson. Both have denied Watts’ allegations. DHA attorney Paige Mebane, from Dallas law firm Coats Rose, called her clients’ records exemplary and the charges erroneous and unsubstantiated, saying that Watts’ charges lacked lawful support and failed to establish elements necessary for a commissioner’s removal. Mebane described it as a policy disagreement between Watts and the DHA board — not an inefficiency of the commissioners’ duty — and demanded that the mayor withdraw his charges. “If a disagreement in policy was grounds for inefficiency, you wouldn't even need a housing authority board,” Mebane said. “The mayor could just run the housing authority on his own and make all the decisions he wanted, but that's not the process that was set up. Your role is to appoint commissioners.” Neither Davis or Johnson has been removed from the board as of Tuesday, according to a city spokesperson. Both Davis and Johnson, whose terms end next summer, have also claimed a willingness for DHA to host a joint meeting with the City Council, as Davis indicated he and Watts had done a few years ago when they served together on council. DHA uses a public facility corporation (PFCs), a public-private partnership with developers, to develop and manage affordable housing in Denton. The city replicates what DHA does with its own public facility corporation that the council approved in April 2024. Mebane stressed that under Davis’ and Johnson’s tenures, DHA and its affiliates have sponsored the creation of more than 1,700 affordable housing units. Davis, who is also a felony prosecutor at the Denton County District Attorney’s Office, told those gathered at Thursday’s hearing that he was there to stand up to Watts “because what you’re doing is wrong, because standing up is what you do to bullies.” He said Watts had called to ask him to resign, then served him with papers alleging charges in language or a process not required by the statute. Watts is not a “foolish person,” Davis said, but is someone who generally listens and wants to understand — except for in this instance. “In this instance, the only conclusion I can come to is you don’t want to work with DHA, you want to strangle it off, you want to stifle it, you want to push it down so that the city can operate affordable housing in the city of Denton,” Davis said. “So Chris Watts can operate affordable housing in the city of Denton, so that Jesse Kent [from Community Services] can operate affordable housing in the city of Denton. “DHA has more powerful tools than the city does. We have better strategies created for us by statute than the city will ever have for affordable housing in the city. So not only is this an arrogant and misguided thing to do, it will hurt affordable housing in the city.” Johnson told Watts that they don’t have to agree on policy decisions but that she didn’t think “that to destroy my credibility and my reputation should be part of this personal vendetta that I feel that you have against the housing authority.” “But the way that you are trying to intimidate me and move me out of this position, I don’t think that is fair, and I don’t think it’s with integrity,” Johnson said. “Now you met with me, and I felt like you were bullying me. I felt like you were disrespecting me, and I feel like you didn’t think I had any intelligence at all because the way that you would insist on, ‘Well, this is how I’m going to overload this board to where your decision won’t count.’ “These are statements that you made to me. You even put as far as to go into the religious spectrum to stop the pastor to get them to persuade me. I am not a person who can be bullied.” Watts, a local real estate developer and investor, spent two years as a City Council member trying to convince the council to duplicate the housing authority’s model by allowing the city to create a PFC. The public-private partnership would allow the city to incentivize affordable housing development by issuing bonds, finance public facilities or lend proceeds of the obligations to other entities. In April 2024, Watts said the council would have more control over the PFC board than it did over the DHA and that the city could use extra funds from PFC deals to fund more affordable housing projects. DHA board member Sharetta Lee told Watts and the council then that she didn’t see “the need to reinvent the wheel when we already have an agency that knows what they’re doing, has the infrastructure, has the staffing to man something like a PFC, because we already have a PFC. “I just don’t see the need for an additional one in the city of Denton,” Lee said in 2024. “I think a collaboration would work better.” Since taking office in late June, Watts has been on a mission to make changes at housing authority. He appointed Donald Thornton, a former City Council candidate, and reappointed Suganth Baskaran to the DHA board, but those appointments have been delayed, according to Watts. Mebane disputed this allegation, pointing out that Watts had been assured on multiple occasions in writing and in communications that his appointees were acknowledged. In July, the city released a five-year update on the affordable housing toolkit, which Kayla Herrod, the city’s chief communications officer, said provided updates to the state of housing affordability in Denton, income-qualified development, strategic initiatives progress and existing tools for affordability. “As of 2026, the Toolkit goals for rental housing have been met and exceeded,” staff wrote in an update to the City Council. “This was primarily accomplished by large multifamily developments funded by the federal low-income housing tax credit program (“LIHTC”) and tax-exempt partnerships with the Denton Housing Authority.” Three months later, Watts sent his charge letters to remove Davis and Johnson from their appointed positions. Among the seven charges, Watts wrote, in part, that the commissioners had approved, set or maintained rental limits for housing project partnerships at levels no lower than the prevailing market rents charged for comparable private housing rather than at the lowest possible rates necessary to fund them. These multifamily developments include Square9 Apartments, 16Ten East Apartments, Discovery Park Apartments, Woodlands of Denton, Elan Denton, Windsor Apartments, Woods at Forest Crossing, The Venn, North Elm, Arbor Ranch and Eden Village. “Entering into agreements that allow ‘affordable’ rents at market rates in exchange for the Authority receiving a portion of the partnership’s profits is a gross departure from the mandatory duty to set