Former Hickory housing authority CEO sues city and board over her firing
Hickory’s public housing authority CEO, who was fired earlier this year after the city said she under-utilized housing vouchers and spent public money at boutiques, has filed a federal lawsuit against the board and city that once employed her.
Alanda Richardson was the CEO of Hickory’s housing authority for more than 26 years, “making her one of the most experienced leaders in public housing in the nation,” according to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina last week.
Richardson was fired soon after the mayor and city found that she was only using about 60% of the allotted vouchers, and used her public housing authority credit card to pay for items on Temu, boutiques and hotels, according to the lawsuit and reporting from WSOC, The Charlotte Observer’s news partner.
Richardson, in the lawsuit she filed, refutes those claims and introduces a new narrative: that the city and mayor ousted her and disbanded the housing authority for political reasons and to usher in their preferred housing authority leadership. She says the city used faulty voucher use rates when firing her and disbanding the housing authority, which was in charge of placing people with housing vouchers into homes.
In the lawsuit, Richardson says the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told her they had a shortfall and could not financially cover more than 200 of the vouchers she planned to give out. Richardson also says the money she spent at the boutiques was related to housing authority business.
HUD representatives also told Richardson that Hickory’s housing authority “needed to improve the relationship with the city” and said that “things had become political and that they did not know how far the mayor would take it,” according to the lawsuit.
Problems started when Mayor Hank Guess in 2024 appointed Sherry Griffin Long to the housing authority’s board, according to the lawsuit. Long, while on Hickory’s board, was also deputy executive director of the Western Piedmont Council of Governments, an agency Guess and city council reportedly wanted to take over HPHA, according to the lawsuit.
Shortly after Long came onto the board, Guess and city council started submitting complaints about the housing authority to HUD. Then the mayor declined to sign off on a federal required plan from the authority and discussed abolishing the authority — something Richardson says she found out about in the local newspaper.
The mayor eventually did disband the authority, giving its duties to the Western Piedmont Council of Governments.
Richardson is suing the city of Hickory and its now-disbanded housing authority board for breach of contract and wrongfully accusing only the African-Americans on the board of “neglect of duty” and/or “misconduct in office” around the same time as her firing, according to the lawsuit.
Richardson has been controversial before recent years.
In 2015, she was accused of misusing public money to buy iPads, cells phones and other gifts for employees.
