Within just a few weeks of being appointed in February, the four new members of the Vicksburg Housing Authority management commission turned up lots of checks to out-of-town and out-of-state vendors that were questionable to say the least. The work of the commissioners, especially Jay Kilroy, chairman, is to be commended. Innocently or not, it appears that vast amounts of public money was spent with little or no documentation of what taxpayers got in return. In one case, “consultants” on a summer child care program got paid more for “drafting” a contract (the same contract used for many years) than was paid to conduct the actual program.

Up the chain of command, though, there’s silence.

The Vicksburg Housing Authority is not under the auditing or other jurisdiction of the City of Vicksburg. The role of local elected officials is to appoint the commission members who, in turn, hire an executive director. Similarly, the City of Vicksburg does not provide a penny of direct support for the operation and maintenance of the 430 homes and apartments the VHA manages in six locations around the city.

For nearly 21 years, a much-respected person, James Stirgus Sr., was the director. Although he is suspected of no wrongdoing or complicity in any wrongdoing, the former superintendent of public education was fired by the new board. That decision came not as a consequence of what new commission members were finding in the files, but a belief that Stirgus was either impeding or at least not cooperating with a police investigation following the December drug arrest of former maintenance supervisor Charles Jones. Stirgus fired Jones after the arrest, but, it seems, Stirgus still trusted Jones more than he did police.

Those issues aside, it seems alarms should have gone off at state, regional and national headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development at what the new commissioners were finding. They haven’t, at least from what has been made public.

HUD is certainly no stranger to corruption and waste. If the agency is turning a blind eye toward what Kilroy and the other commissioners have been discovering, then certainly that’s an indictment of the integrity of upper-level managers.

The Vicksburg Housing Authority has for decades been a point of pride in this community for its well-maintained properties and the fact that 100 percent of tenants pay at least some rent. Public housing is slum housing elsewhere. Not in Vicksburg.

It would be great to be able to brag on the VHA again, but that can’t be done until there’s some indication that HUD even cares to find out if there’s an explanation for all the unexplained invoices.