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By Gretchen Keiser, Staff Writer
ATLANTA—The 21-year veteran director of the refugee
resettlement program of the archdiocese resigned Oct. 2 over a conflict of
interest involving property where refugees resettled by Catholic Social
Services were placed.
Bui Van Tam, who has directed refugee resettlement at Catholic
Social Services since 1979, resigned after the archdiocese was informed that
his wife, Anh Le, is a co-owner of property on Formwalt Street near Turner
Field in which refugees are currently being placed by Catholic Social Services.
“That is a conflict of interest,” said Matthew Coles,
general counsel for the archdiocese, “for the director to be placing
refugees in property owned by his spouse.”
Coles said Tam’s wife has been a co-owner of the property
since about 1994, according to the information Tam has given him.
“He was very sorry that he had put the archbishop in this
potentially embarrassing position,” Coles said.
Tam’s resignation came after a press conference at which
Archbishop John F. Donoghue apologized in light of the living conditions at the
Crescent Hills Apartments, another apartment complex, where CSS currently has
placed 34 refugee families and where other refugee families placed by CSS in
the past continue to live.
Six CSS-sponsored families were moved Oct. 1 out of the Crescent
Hills Apartments, whose condition was described as “deplorable” by
Archbishop Donoghue.
The families, who number about 60 people, were moved temporarily
into a motel a mile from the apartments. The archbishop, at the press
conference, apologized to the CSS refugee families who were placed at the
Crescent Hills Apartments and to Catholics of the archdiocese “who have
placed their trust in Catholic Social Services.”
The apartment complex is in south Atlanta, off I-75 on Cleveland
Avenue. It is just off Metropolitan Parkway, formerly Stewart Avenue.
In the multi-building complex, some apartment units have broken
windows or cardboard-patched windows, some have appliances such as stoves and
plumbing that don’t work, and some are dirty and infested with roaches.
Archdiocesan officials went door to door Oct. 1 to offer all 34
families the opportunity to relocate from Crescent Hills, Archbishop Donoghue
said. Twenty-two families initially said they did not want to relocate. Another
five or six families could not be reached that day, officials said. Archbishop
Donoghue also said that the conditions at Crescent Hills Apartments, the
subject of articles in The Atlanta Journal Constitution, have prompted a review
of the CSS refugee resettlement program and its policies and procedures.
“Even though this discovery has been a cause of great
embarrassment to Catholic Social Services and the archdiocese, we are glad that
this was brought to our attention because it gives us the opportunity to
correct a problem that truthfully should never have occurred,” the
archbishop said.
“In a sense, through our actions as well as our omissions and
oversights, we have not been ‘church’ to these people. There is no
excuse for this so we will make none. However, the evidence compels the
archdiocese to look at the infrastructure of CSS and their resettlement program
and challenges us to develop new and effective policies and procedures,”
he said.
The archbishop also said that he had asked a group of parishes to
become involved with assisting the refugee families on an immediate basis. The
parishes are the Cathedral of Christ the King, Atlanta, St. John Neumann
Church, Lilburn, Holy Spirit Church, Atlanta, St. Andrew Church, Roswell, and
All Saints Church, Dunwoody.
Also taking questions at the press conference were Dr. Jim
Kantner, Secretary of Catholic Charities, Pam Buckmaster, executive director of
Catholic Social Services, and Tam, the director of Multicultural Services of
CSS.
The Multicultural Services Program is reportedly the oldest
refugee resettlement agency in Georgia. It resettles 400-500 refugees each
year.
A former officer in the South Vietnamese Navy, Bui Van Tam and his
wife, his mother and two of his children, then 1 and 2 years old, escaped from
South Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975. Taken to Vietnamese refugee
camps in Subic Bay in the Philippines and then Guam, both Tam and Anh Le worked
in public health in the camps. They were among the first Vietnamese families to
come to Atlanta in 1975, sponsored by an Atlanta doctor.
They helped found the fledgling Vietnamese Catholic community in
the archdiocese, now Our Lady of Vietnam Church in Riverdale. They began
helping other Vietnamese refugees who came to Atlanta and, in 1979, Tam was
hired as the director of the refugee resettlement program at CSS.
Refugees, as distinct from immigrants, are people fleeing from a
desperate situation in their homeland, usually war, tribal or religious
conflicts or other major crises. The United States approves a certain number of
refugees to be admitted to this country each year—78,000 in 1999 and
83,000 in 1998.
The United States Catholic Conference is one of 10 voluntary
agencies that works with the U.S. State Department to resettle refugees. The
USCC receives both government and private funding to resettle refugees. It, in
turn, works with 100 agencies around the country who resettle refugees in their
respective areas. Most local resettlement agencies, like Atlanta, are part of
Catholic Charities. The agency takes responsibility for refugees officially for
a 90-day contractual period. After that time, additional help is often given,
but the refugee is expected to be working and initially placed in housing and
schools.
Multicultural Services of CSS has recently been resettling
refugees from Bosnia, the Sudan, the Congo, Afghanistan, Togo, Iraq, Somalia
and Rwanda, among other countries.
The U.S. Catholic Conference currently receives $740 in federal
funds for each refugee it resettles, according to Mark Franken, executive
director of the Migration and Refugee Services of the USCC. In exchange, the
Catholic Conference agrees to provide specific services to help the refugees
become initially settled in this country.
The $740 allocation is divided in three ways, Franken said, 36
percent to direct assistance to the refugee, 43 percent to support the local
program for refugee resettlement and 21 percent to the national Catholic
Conference resettlement office.
Up to $270 on average per refugee goes to direct assistance like
food, clothing and shelter, he said.
In addition, he said, “It is understood that this in no way
covers the true cost of resettling a refugee.”
“The Catholic Church makes a commitment to bring other
resources to the table” in the form of parish support, volunteer resources
and other assistance through local Catholic Social Services, he said.
Secondly, the funding through the U.S. State Department is “a
small part” of what is available to refugees through the federal
government, Franken said. Funds from the federal Department of Health and Human
Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, primarily disbursed through
state agencies, provide medical assistance to refugees and a range of social
services including language classes, orientation services, employment services
and job training, he said.
“I think that housing refugees can be challenging in certain
communities, particularly where the housing stock may be limited in low-income
ranges,” Franken said in response to the situation brought to light at the
Crescent Hills Apartments.
He said he was not familiar with that location, but praised the
steps taken by the archdiocese to respond quickly to relocate the families from
Crescent Hills Apartments.
“We are very supportive of that action,” he said.
“We will work closely with the archdiocese and Catholic Social Services to
ensure that” they are able to find appropriate housing for the refugees.
“We view this effort of resettling refugees as a partnership
between our office and the local diocese,” Franken said. “When
confronted with these kinds of issues, we will work together” to ensure
that the refugees are placed in appropriate housing.
The Atlanta refugee resettlement program has resettled a
significant number of refugees over the past 20 years, he said. “It has
been a positive relationship over the years.”
At the press conference, Buckmaster said that apartments are
inspected before refugees are placed in them and must pass a checklist to be
approved.
She said many of the caseworkers are former refugees themselves
and “take this not as a job, but as a calling. They give their heart and
their soul.”
In response to a question, she said people had not been placed at
Crescent Hills Apartments for several months.
According to archdiocesan officials, a routine audit of facilities
in Georgia where refugees are placed has been conducted by the State
Department, but the archdiocese has not received the results of that audit yet.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution produced an exchange of letters
dated November 1999 in which Joyce Smith, a parishioner at St. Anthony’s
Church, Atlanta, wrote to Msgr. Peter A. Dora, then vicar general, and
characterized the Crescent Hills Apartments as a “filthy, vermin-infested
complex, with gang graffiti throughout.”
Smith, who was considering volunteering with refugees, said she
and another volunteer had met with Tam and other staff members to express
concern about the placement of refugees at that particular apartment complex,
which she said was in stark contrast to other, higher quality placement sites
in the Stone Mountain area. She also asked that archdiocesan funds be directed
toward the refugee program “to do much more” for the refugees.
“I am appalled and embarrassed that the archdiocese is not
doing more to ensure that all of the refugees it services are treated with
dignity,” Smith wrote.
In his response, Tam said that limited funds precluded the agency
from doing more. “We do the best we can,” he wrote. Msgr. Dora
referred to Tam’s letter and said that in light of the growth of the
archdiocese, “we have no choice but to apply available resources in a
measured manner.” |
