Interim officers still assessing EOB’s woes

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Thursday, July 29, 2004 | 8:35 a.m.

Mary Twitty, the new interim executive director of the Economic Opportunity Board, spoke of getting "past the clouds and ... to the sunshine" after reporting to the troubled nonprofit organization's board for the first time Wednesday.

But her report -- along with that of new deputy director Dan Miller -- was short on details, and the three board members who showed up were short on questions.

Miller gave a general overview of the work facing the two new leaders and any other personnel they may hire in the 3 1/2 months left in their contract with the EOB, but no details on the organization's finances emerged at Wednesday's meeting.

"We are still assessing and determining the overall financial situation," Twitty said in explaining the need to wait until August's board meeting for a fiscal report.

The lack of updated financial information marked the fourth consecutive month the board met without getting a detailed idea of the books behind the organization, which last year received nearly $60 million in public funds to help the poor.

Twitty and Miller were both brought in by an outside group hired earlier this month to manage the troubled organization, after two negative federal reviews and one state-ordered, federally-funded review in the last six months.

The group -- known as the Peer to Peer Crisis Intervention team from Mid-Iowa Community Action Inc. -- did one of the three reviews in April. The review recommended the board trim its membership, which it did, dropping from 15 to six members, and it recommended that the EOB bring in outside management, which wound up being the Mid-Iowa group itself. The interim management duo is to remain in the Las Vegas Valley trying to straighten out the EOB's problems through mid-November.

Wednesday's three absent board members were Las Vegas City Councilman Lawrence Weekly, community activist Marion Bennett and Latin Chamber of Commerce member Vicente Herrera.

Twitty told the board one of her first orders of business was a review of the organization's credit card policy, based on travel and "emergencies," which refers to staff members "needing to buy food on weekends and (make) car repairs" for their work.

"I think we need to work on that," she said. She also said that "cards, for the most part, were within fiscal control." At the same time, Twitty said she had seen no sign of the cards being mishandled and found most accounts to carry balances of about $250.

No board members asked how many credit cards were in use or how many had been reviewed to date, or how many or what percentage of the cards were not under control of the EOB's fiscal staff.

Twitty said after the meeting she had looked at six credit card bills, but could not yet venture an estimate about how many cards were in use at the organization.

The executive director said she would propose a new credit-card policy at the next board meeting, set for Aug. 30.

As for the series of deadlines the reviews impose on the organization, Twitty said the EOB was "on track with most monitoring reviews" and mentioned a meeting it is facing today with the Housing and Urban Development Department.

HUD said in a letter to the EOB last week that it still hadn't corrected a series of problems identified in its April review -- including the lack of proof that nearly a half-million dollars had been spent to help the homeless get housing -- but Twitty told the board she "anticipate(d) nothing new" in today's meeting.

No board member asked about the letter or the meeting.

After the meeting, Twitty said the EOB's staff had "had some dialogue" with HUD after getting the letter, and that the organization "had some communication problems" with the federal agency that made it difficult to know exactly what the agency was seeking.

She said the EOB "hoped to have everything they need" at the meeting.

Also in the meeting, Miller said to the three board members in attendance that the organization is behind in billing the federal government for services offered to the community and behind in paying some of the agencies with which it contracts to offer services such as child care.

No board members asked about how much money might be involved in the billing or payment issues, nor about how long they might have been going on.

But Marcia Fredrickson, owner of Marcia's Child Care Center in North Las Vegas, said during the public comment part of the meeting that she expected to get a $14,000 check on July 21 for providing a month of child care to poor families but still hadn't received the money. After the meeting, she said this was the third straight month the EOB has been late in its payment to the center.

Fredrickson complained that she had been told by a child care division employee to call Miller and had left four messages.

Board chairman Claude Logan told her to keep trying to reach Miller.

"We have a lot of vendors," he explained.

Twitty said she was hopeful that the payment problem and others would be solved in the coming months.

"Our goal is to provide quality services," she said.

"We want to get past these reviews ... and past the clouds, and get to the sunshine."