Federal team will look into problems facing EOB

By Timothy Pratt

Wednesday, March 17, 2004 | 11:16 a.m.

The nonprofit agency with the largest budget in the Las Vegas Valley -- most of which comes from federal funds -- agreed Monday to let a federal "strike team" come in to help with a series of problems it is facing.

It will be the first time such a team has been dispatched to Nevada, said Mike Willden, director of the state Human Resources Department, which oversees four divisions that channel funds to Economic Opportunity Board programs and will be paying for the federal team's review of the board.

"It's only done when the federal government determines an agency is in a crisis," Willden said. The crisis facing the agency includes $2.1 million in state and federal funds missing from a child care program and the recent loss of the board's executive director and chief financial officer.

But how EOB executive board members who reached Tuesday's decision see that crisis or what they thought en route to the decision remains unknown because the meeting was held behind closed doors.

The meeting involved the organization's executive board members -- state Sen. Joe Neal, Henry Herbert, Eloiza Martinez, Hannah Brown and Claude Logan as well as Mike Husted, assistant director of the EOB.

Husted went in and out of the room at least four times during the two-hour meeting. A conference call was made to Willden. A letter was prepared to send to Willden at a typewriter outside the meeting. Halfway through the meeting, a secretary was called in.

When asked why the meeting was closed to the public, Neal, D-North Las Vegas -- one of five elected officials on the EOB board -- said first that the attorney general had said in the past that the nonprofit agency wasn't covered by Nevada's open-meeting law. Later in the day, Neal said that the law had been amended in 1997 to exclude all nonprofit agencies from opening their meetings to the public.

Neal was named as the agency's spokesman Tuesday, apparently replacing board chairman Claude Logan. Access to administrative staff has been mostly denied during the last week.

Tom Sargent, spokesman for Attorney General Brian Sandoval, said a two-line opinion was issued by then-Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Pappa in 1996 that said the EOB was not covered by the law. Sargent said an analysis of that opinion would be prepared today.

"But we don't know what may have changed with regards to their status since that time," he said.

One thing that has changed in recent years is the agency's budget has doubled, now at nearly $60 million -- making it the largest nonprofit agency providing services in the valley. Most of that money comes from the federal government.

Legislative Counsel Bureau attorney Brenda Erdoes said that the open-meeting law was not amended in 1997, but was amended in 1995 and 2001. Neither change addressed nonprofit agencies, however.

Erdoes also said that attorney general opinions in recent years regarding other nonprofit agencies in Nevada have said that they were covered by the law on two occasions.

But Craig Walton, University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor of ethics and policy studies, said that regardless of the law the EOB's meetings should be open to the public. Tuesday's meeting, in particular, deserved public scrutiny, he said.

"Their meetings always should be open ... and nothing could strengthen the achieving of their goals more than openness," Walton said.

Tuesday's meeting, Walton said, "was about an oversight question -- and this is coming up all over the United States, where it isn't clear who's watching over things.

"The public needs to know what's behind the decision -- the reasoning, the depth of consideration given," he said.

Neal said the decision to back the federal team was made "in order to get an assessment of where we are because we had the director resign and other little problems we've been having and that you've been reporting about."

He said the agency needs to see if it has "too many staff or is top-heavy and to see how grants are going and where the money is."

Willden said the team -- tied to the Health and Human Services Department, the parent agency for the $20 million child care assistance program from which the $2.1 million is missing -- will be paid from a $170,000 discretionary fund of federal money that the state manages.

The team's visit -- from April 5 to April 10 -- is expected to cost about $29,000, Willden said.

"We've never had to do this before," he said, referring to bringing in the team.

The state official said the team will recommend ways to fix the agency's problems.

"Their role is not to play gotcha, but to find solutions," he said.