In mid-2024, the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority issued a pair of no-bid contracts to a Florida-based recruitment consulting firm.
The first contract with Gans, Gans & Associates covered the search for a deputy executive officer, who would become second in command to the now-fired Executive Director Nathan Simms. Two months later, the firm was hired for a study to determine if Simms’ pay and NRHA’s overall compensation and benefits were competitive.
The contracts, worth at least $82,500 in total, were not put out for public bid, a standard practice for government contracts meant to keep costs down and avoid corruption by encouraging public competition.
Why they weren’t bid out is unclear. NRHA said it has no records explaining the no-bid contracts — paperwork required by law for noncompetitive procurements.
Simms authorized more than 30 no-bid contracts during his two-year tenure at NRHA, many of which lacked the required justifications. Those moves contributed to his firing and spurred an ongoing investigation that NRHA officials said is examining possible crimes.
Months after getting fired in Norfolk, Simms was in the running for the top job at another housing authority, this time in Charleston, S.C.
Charleston hired a firm to help find its new housing authority leader: Gans, Gans & Associates.Emerging from a reported field of 72 candidates, Simms was offered the Charleston job in March. He was officially hired on April 27.
The following day, WHRO published the first part of an investigation revealing Simms authorized no-bid contracts worth more than $4.3 million at NRHA, including some to contractors with direct personal and professional ties to him and other top NRHA staff.
Those contracts violated state law, federal rules and Norfolk’s own policies.
Officials in Charleston have repeatedly said they’re confident in Simms, who took over as CEO there on May 4. But the Charleston board also announced it’s initiating its own inquiry following WHRO’s investigation.
It’s unclear how much Charleston officials knew about Gans’ prior connections to Simms when it hired him.
Simms and other Charleston Housing Authority officials, including the board’s chair and vice-chair, did not respond to requests for interviews for this story or to emailed questions.
Simone Gans Barefield, the chief executive officer of Gans, Gans & Associates, told a WHRO reporter she was on another call and would get back to him when she was reached by phone. She did not return subsequent calls or respond to emailed questions.
NRHA paid Gans five figures for pay study, COO search
Nine months into Simms’ tenure as executive director of NRHA, the agency issued a no-bid contract to Gans, Gans & Associates to determine if the agency's compensation was competitive and to create recommendations improving recruiting and retaining executive staff.
The compensation study contract was for $24,500 and promised to evaluate salaries, including what Simms was paid. But NRHA, in response to a records request, did not list it as paid.
"The NRHA now desires human resources consulting assistance to conduct a new objective analysis of the current Executive Director position’s compensation and benefits; recommend changes that result in equitable, competitive and legally defensible pay that will enrich the attraction and retention of qualified individuals as well as evaluate the current Executive level benefits and compensation against local and regional, markets and comparable employers," according to the proposal from Gans obtained through a public records request.
Two months earlier, Simms had pushed through another no-bid contract for Gans to lead the search for a deputy executive director that resulted in the hiring of Demetria Walker Johnson. Johnson worked for Simms in Atlanta, one of several former colleagues he hired at NRHA.
In response to a records request, NRHA said it paid Gans $58,112 for the executive search.
Johnson and several other top-level officials hired by Simms departed NRHA early this year, after long-time NRHA staffer Michael Clark returned from retirement to become interim executive director.WHRO’s investigation found at least $1 million worth of the no-bid contracts issued by NRHA under Simms went to contractors with links to the former executive director and his top deputies — including one Atlanta man with whom Johnson had run a private financial business.
A spreadsheet obtained through a records request shows NRHA did not issue a single no-bid contract in the two years before Simms arrived.
The procurement issue came to a head in October after Simms failed to provide all the information the board's Finance Committee requested. He acknowledged paperwork justifying the contracts was missing, according to emails obtained by WHRO.
Simms was fired by the board in November 2025.
Two boards, two different views of Simms
In the 2024 compensation study proposal from Gans, Barefield wrote the "study will include meetings with the Study Project Team, Administrative Services, employees, and the NRHA Board, as desired." The study, she wrote, would be completed in two to three months.
WHRO filed a public records request for the compensation study, but NRHA officials have so far been unable to provide it.
“NRHA staff did not receive or see a copy of a compensation study,” NRHA said in response to the records request. “The study or report may have been provided directly to Mr. Simms, and it was not shared.”
There are references to a compensation study in a budget report for the NRHA board for the May 2025 meeting. Johnson, one of Simms’ personal hires, noted in that update that "salaries were evaluated by a compensation study to align NRHA with other agencies." No report was included.
NRHA board chair Earl Fraley and vice chair Philip Smith said they did not recall any discussion of the study, nor were they contacted by Gans. Both were on the board when the contract was issued, but were not the chair or the vice chair.
Smith said the Simms debacle has highlighted the need for close oversight and expertise among board members charged with running the largest housing authority in the state with an annual $156 million budget.
"One of the things we've learned is that the board needs to be engaged," Smith said. "We have to have a good working relationship with an executive director who we can trust."
The board has turned over considerably in the last three years. Four of the eight commissioners serving when the Gans contracts were issued in mid-2024 are no longer on the board.
Simms did not have a contract with NRHA, nor is there a severance agreement, the agency told WHRO in response to a records request. His annual salary as of July 15, 2025, was $273,041. His starting salary in November 2023 was $250,016.
NRHA’s internal investigation into Simms is ongoing, as is an outside audit. Meanwhile, Charleston is opening its own inquiry, even as leaders there have doubled down on backing Simms.
Charleston housing authority board chair Greg Voigt said in an emailed statement on May 5 that the board remains confident in the hire.
“The Board, the leadership team and general counsel have conducted additional intensive due diligence beyond that completed during our search process and, based on information available, are confident in our decision and in Mr. Simms' leadership and expertise,” Voigt wrote in the statement.
However, at a press conference two days later, Voigt revealed Charleston would be contracting an outside group to conduct an independent investigation.
“We are retaining a Virginia firm to thoroughly go through every potentially meritorious accusation. They’re going to be as broad as they can be, and we owe that to the people that we serve, and we owe that to the city of Charleston,” Voigt told Charleston media at the May 8 press conference.
He later clarified that the board had not yet hired a firm for its investigation, and that it would choose between three finalists within 10 days. Still, Voigt reiterated the depths of the Charleston board’s due diligence in its hiring of Simms.
“Essentially, you know, everywhere, from his first job on Wall Street all the way through where he is today, we had made those inquiries. We felt satisfied with the answers that we had,” Voigt said.
Norfolk officials told WHRO they were never contacted by anyone from Charleston, or from Gans during the search, and still have not received any inquiries from the agency.
Voigt expressed confidence in the hiring process and in Gans as its search firm at the press conference, saying his board would “probably” hire Gans again if it needed the firm’s recruitment services. He noted Gans would not be involved in the planned investigation.
Voigt told reporters at the press conference that he and the board knew many things about Simms and his background that were not public. Those things gave them confidence in their decision to hire him, but it’s not clear if they were aware of Gans’ previous dealings with Simms.
Charleston officials did not respond to questions from WHRO about the hiring process, Gans or whether they knew about the firm’s contracts with NRHA.
Gans, Gans & Associates lists numerous housing authorities as clients, including those in Baltimore, Chicago, Richmond and Atlanta Housing, where Johnson worked for decades before being hired by NRHA and where Simms worked briefly in 2018.
In his first public comments since WHRO’s investigation, Simms said during the May 8 press conference in Charleston that he welcomed his new employer’s inquiry and contended he had operated within the rules in Norfolk.
“I appreciate the (Charleston) housing authority's willingness to look beyond selective narratives and conduct a thorough review of the facts,” Simms said. “I worked through our procurement channels with the agency, knowing I never have and never will just be reckless with resources to just give to people. There's a process. I work through that process, and I stand by that.”
WHRO made repeated requests by phone and email to speak with Simms, Charleston board members and other officials at the Charleston Housing Authority for this story. WHRO also emailed a list of questions to the agency’s public information officer and a public relations firm contracted by the agency.
The only responses came from the firm, which said “the only interviews Mr. Simms is doing at the moment are local interviews to introduce him to the community he is serving.”
