Help from heaven oftentimes is unexpected. Surprisingly, a retired city employee from another city, Zerbe, was sent to us as a helper. No longer bureaucratic, unorthodox and audacious considering his conservative background, he knew the bureaucratic jargon and how city officials think.
Zerbe was a referral resulting from a National Conference on Citizen Participation and Public Affairs in Tufts University, organized by Stuart Langton in 1978, that Ellen and I attended with a scholarship. With Stuart, in cooperation with HUD, a Community Development Center of Atlanta Georgia awarded the TBA a technical assistance contract in the form of Zerbe. In a short time, Zerbe helped us untangle the webs of confusion and miscommunication that we and the City Department through Dan Benitez were snared in, and in less than a year, Zerbe disappeared as quietly as he had appeared. Talking about unknown heroes in history, he is one of them.
In our first year, the City Department through manipulation, only let us use administrative money. For our second-year request, they told the City Council we had no accomplishments to show for our expenses. However, by then we had plenty of other results, keeping the Council well informed, demonstrating the fallacy of the cause and effect in their argument. By overcoming bureaucratic hurdles, Zerbe made it possible for us to continue, since the City Council unanimously approved our second-year funding. We were now ready to work. We hired Susy as Rehab Specialist, the architectural student that had participated so effectively in the University study of the Barrio done a while back. Much too soon Zerbe had left. Unfortunately, when there is money involved, people who had never appeared before, show up.
Thinking that Susy would follow my written guidelines on the Rehab Program, I had gone on to update the Self-Help Housing Program and begin the family selection. Unbeknownst to me, Ellen and Susy, had taken the list of contractors that the City uses for their Rehabs to start work on the first three houses. Someone had been looking out for us. Had Zerbe stayed longer, some mistakes could have been avoided, and later he could have had unraveled for me a famous department ‘memo’ which I would bump into in the future.