In its newest round of appointments to the Manufactured Housing Consensus Committee (MHCC), announced in a February 4, 2015 News Release (see, copy below), HUD has once again denied the industry collective voting representation – an important right that it provides to the MHCC “users” group (i.e., consumers) – while it continues to selectively manipulate membership terms in ways that will undercut the independence of the MHCC and return it to the rubber-stamp status of the defunct Manufactured Housing Advisory Council.
When HUD abruptly terminated collective industry voting representation on the MHCC – which had existed since the initial formation of the Committee in 2002 – it supposedly acted on the basis of a 2010 White House document which prohibited registered federal lobbyists from serving on federal advisory committees. Since then, official guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) clarifies that non-lobbyist employees of advocacy organizations are not barred from advisory committee membership, and the industry has fully complied with that guidance in submitting applications from such persons for appointment to the MHCC. Unfortunately, however, HUD continues to ignore those applications, thus denying the industry, the MHCC and other program stakeholders of the institutional memory, knowledge and know-how that such candidates could provide. To the extent, moreover, that this exclusion is enforced only against the industry, it effectively discriminates against the HUD Code manufacturers that face the brunt of federal regulation and related regulatory compliance costs.
In addition, as has been evident for some time, HUD is selectively retaining, releasing and/or appointing MHCC members in ways that diminish the Committee’s independence as mandated and intended by Congress, and appear to be designed instead to achieve critical mass for an aggressive pro-regulation majority. Thus, while the MHCC Bylaws specify that members serve “at the pleasure of the Secretary” for “a term of three (3) years, not to exceed two (2) consecutive terms” – i.e., six years total – certain members who have demonstrated independence from HUD have been dropped from the MHCC either prematurely, or at the end of six years, while others, such as energy regulation advocate Michael Lubliner, an MHCC member since 2006, have served for years beyond the supposed two-term limit.
Moreover, the manipulation of MHCC voting membership takes a new twist in this latest round of appointments, with the selection of Robin Roy, Director of Building Efficiency and Clean Energy Strategy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an “environmental” special interest group. With no specific background in manufactured housing or the unique issues affecting its construction and status as the nation’s most affordable housing, Mr. Roy was appointed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to its manufactured housing Working Group, where he was a leading advocate for costly new energy standards and voted in October 2014 to recommend the adoption of regulations that will undermine consumer choice while increasing the retail price of manufactured homes by thousands of dollars. Now, appointed to the MHCC by HUD, he will join other single-issue energy advocates already serving on the MHCC in “reviewing” those same proposals, and will be provided as well with a platform to advocate for other costly regulatory measures.
Thus, while HUD has publicly promised on multiple occasions to bring any DOE-proposed manufactured housing energy standards to the MHCC, as previously reported by MHARR, the value of that promise is only as good as the independence of the MHCC and its members. That independence — however, both generally and specifically as it relates to this critical issue – is undermined by this appointment, which expands the overlap between members of the DOE Working Group who supported its recommendations, and members of the MHCC.
This manipulation of the MHCC, in conjunction with recent HUD contracting actions which violate the “separate and independent” contractors provision of the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000, reflect an accelerating trend within the HUD program to return to the practices of the 1980s and 1990s, which Congress sought to cure via the reforms of the 2000 law. While the industry had hoped that HUD compliance with the 2000 reform law would improve under the new program Administrator, specific actions are beginning to accumulate which show otherwise.
