EOB to spend fed money for advisory group

By Timothy Pratt

Thursday, July 1, 2004 | 11:01 a.m.

Five of the six board members who remain after the executive branch of the Economic Opportunity Board was recently pared down met for the first time Wednesday and mostly agreed to put off any work until an outside group comes in to manage the organization next month.

The management group will be paid with up to $224,000 in federal funds and is expected to run the troubled organization for nearly five months, officials said.

The board, which was at 15 members until a federally-funded review of the Las Vegas Valley's largest nonprofit organization recommended cutting it back and starting over again, agreed Wednesday to the basic terms of the group's temporary takeover. The group will be in charge next Wednesday until Nov. 26.

At this week's meeting, the organization's board members again put off discussing any fiscal reports about the EOB. The organization had a $60 million budget in 2003 that has been judged to be in disarray by two recent federal reviews and a third, federally funded, state-ordered review.

There has been no updated financial information on the organization presented to the board for at least three months.

"We don't have a problem. We have an understanding of where we're at," said Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, board member and a spokesman for the organization, when asked about the organization's finances.

"We will get to that when the new team comes in," he added.

The team -- known as the Peer to Peer Crisis Intervention team from Mid-Iowa Community Action Inc. -- was hired for $17,500 by the state to review the EOB in early April. Its review said the board needed rebuilding and finances and management needed fixing. It also recommended that an outside team be brought in to help.

Wednesday's meeting didn't include any mention of the results of the last of the three reviews to be released, sent June 25 to board chairman Claude Logan and notifying the organization of 33 violations of federal rules tied to the $12.2 million Head Start program. The review report gave 45-day and 90-day deadlines to correct those violations.

Neal said a meeting would soon be called with the Head Start policy council -- a group of parents and other community members that is supposed to share control over the early education program with the board -- to discuss that review.

Wednesday's meeting was the first by the new board, created when eight of 15 members of the old one voted May 26 to cut down to six members. The remaining six are Neal, Claude Logan, Las Vegas Councilman Lawrence Weekly, Latin Chamber of Commerce President Eloiza Martinez, Vicente Herrera and the Rev. Marion Bennett. Weekly did not attend Wednesday's meeting.

In recent weeks the new board had decided, together with the state, to bring back the same team that recommended hiring an outside team, officials said.

The price tag for that help will be up to $224,000, according to Michael Torvinen, who was at Wednesday's meeting and works with the state Department of Human Resources, which oversees the EOB's largest program, child care assistance. The department called for the Mid-Iowa Community Action review.

During the four-plus months that the team will be overseeing the organization's 30-some programs meant to help the poor, it will fill a series of voids left in day-to-day management, brought on by the lack of an executive director, a deputy director and vacancies in other key positions.

The most recent member of management to leave was Brian Sagert, administrator of the organization's housing division, who resigned last week.

Torvinen said top priorities for the team will be responding to the organization's negative reviews and reversing the trend of staff turnover.

The agreement between the Mid-Iowa team and the EOB that the board approved in Wednesday's meeting included preparing a plan to correct the organization's overall course by July 23.

Neal said the EOB's problems were behind it.

But outside the meeting Wednesday, Pam Henry, chairman of the Head Start Policy Council, was perplexed by the board's failure to even mention the federal review of that program and by the lack of communication between the board and her group.

The review noted that the historical lack of communication between the board and the council was one of the problems the EOB needed to fix.

"No one has contacted me about the review, in regards to 'let's look at this, see where we need to go,"' she said.

"There's no shared governance happening at all," Henry added.