Toronto Mayor Rob Ford says he expects to have a new Toronto Community Housing board in place within a month and intends to have his city manager run the corporation in the interim.

Those remarks followed the stunning resignation of the chair of Toronto Community Housing and all six other citizen board members Thursday morning, amid a scandal involving expenses and purchasing practices.

Two tenant reps on the board said they plan to stay, but Ford is urging them to step aside as well. And embattled CEO Keiko Nakamura stuck to her position that she would not step down.

Ford voiced his intentions after a luncheon speech in which he welcomed the mass resignation.

“They’ve all resigned and we’ll be turning it over to the city manager (Joe Pennachetti),’’he said.

He suggested there would be an interview process for new board members, and that he expects the new board could be appointed and functioning within a month. He said he plans to retain the four city councillors recently appointed to the board.

Councillor and board member Frances Nunziata said Ford would table a motion at Tuesday’s council meeting to officially “dismantle” the current board. She said she expected to resign but hoped to be reappointed.

Board chair David Mitchell announced the resignations, effective immediately, at the end of a special meeting held to deal with scathing reports written by city auditor-general Jeff Griffiths. Griffiths told the board that what he found, including details of lavish Christmas parties and other perks for staff, “angered and outraged’” him. He said the audits uncovered a lack of common sense and disregard for taxpayers’ money.

Mitchell blasted Ford for calling on him to step down through the media after the reports were released Monday.

“The mayor did not give me the courtesy of a phone call, an email, communication through his staff, or formal letter,” Mitchell, a former Toronto Community Housing resident, told reporters.

“There’s an issue of courtesy and process,” he said.

It wasn’t until Thursday morning that Ford sent a letter to the board asking its members to step down.

The two tenant representatives on the board vowed to stay on until the tenants who voted for them remove them, or Ford does so through the city’s agreement with the agency as its sole shareholder.

Nakamura, the CEO of the agency, acknowledged there had been inappropriate spending and that TCHC had “failed.” She apologized to residents.

At one point during the meeting she wiped away tears and had to excuse herself from the room when some tenants in attendance spoke passionately that she should remain in her job.

Nakamura said new financial controls have been put in place and a new senior procurement manager will be hired soon. Steps have also been taken to get back $28,000 in “immediately recoverable funds” — with $17,600 already obtained and litigation being launched to get more.

As to disciplining wayward staff, Nakamura said six people involved are “no longer working for the company,’’ while 14 remain employed but have undergone discipline through a suspension, repayment and warnings. Four remain under investigation through an internal TCHC audit.

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When asked if he would seek to fire Nakamura, Ford said Thursday: “Well, I’ll have an answer by tomorrow, like I said at the beginning of the week, and we’ll be taking it from there. We’re going to get this board back on its feet and restore the trust. A lot of tenants are really upset and rightfully so,’’ he said.

But not all tenants were calling for the board members’ heads.

After the meeting, Beverly Smith, a tenant of the TCHC building at 341 Bloor St.W., expressed disappointment they had resigned, adding she hopes Nakamura won’t follow them.

“I would have liked them to have continued the rest of their term, (but) I understand at this point, with Keiko making moves, the new wave, it’s important to have the new people in position at that time,” Smith said. As to Nakamura, “I see her engaging and building the community and bringing things in proper perspective and alignment for the enrichment of the community.”

Catherine Wilkinson, a tenant representative on the board, said she expected her colleagues to quit after Ford took aim at them.

“It is totally unfair for these people, these high-calibre professional people who have dedicated three and a half years of their life to this organization, for them to be dragged through the mud like this publicly,” Wilkinson told reporters.

“They have careers, they have a lot to lose. And the mayor of the city is publicly challenging them and taking them on? They have a lot at stake. Their safety’s at stake when those kinds of things are said.”

The other tenant representative, Dan King, defended a $25 million sole-sourced contract with Byng Group to refurbish TCHC units, a deal the auditor-general criticized because it broke the rules requiring competitive bids and potentially wasted taxpayers’ money.

“We generated jobs for tenants as a result of that,” King said. “People cleaning out and painting … the fact is that we’ve got tenants sitting there looking for jobs and we’ve got industry happening right in their own apartment buildings — people getting jobs, people going to work, people getting paid. Why are they not a part of that? It was a watershed … This was the first time it was done, giving jobs to tenants in our buildings, and I think we should do more of it.”

Wilkinson and King said they won’t resign unless they get a signal to do so from the tenants who chose them.