Editorial: EOB has dug itself a deeper hole

Thursday, March 18, 2004 | 8:59 a.m.

On Monday the Economic Opportunity Board's executive board met behind closed doors and agreed that the nonprofit anti-poverty agency will seek help from a federal agency so it can fix serious financial problems it's facing. Last week the Sun disclosed that the EOB, the largest nonprofit agency in the Las Vegas Valley, can't account for $2.1 million in federal and state funds out of its annual budget of $60 million. The EOB's financial disarray doesn't end there, because it has fallen behind in making payments to other nonprofit groups.

The EOB, which oversees programs that provide child care, senior day care, job training, health care and drug treatment, likely will have to make cuts to some of these programs to make up the difference. The EOB definitely could use the kind of outside assistance and expertise provided by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, but as Sun reporter Tim Pratt noted in a Wednesday story, the public doesn't know how the EOB's members view the crisis or how they reached their decision because the EOB's executive board met secretly on Monday.

The EOB receives federal and state funds, both directly using them for its own programs or passing them on to other nonprofit groups, a situation that compels openness. But state Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, one of five elected officials who sit on the EOB's executive board, said that the nonprofit agency isn't covered by the state's open-meeting law. While an attorney general's opinion in 1996 said that the EOB didn't have to abide by the open-meeting law, two subsequent opinions by the attorney general said other nonprofit agencies were covered by the open-meeting law.

It's inexcusable that the EOB, which handles large sums of public money, would resort to meeting in secret when it finds itself in trouble. Even if the EOB's executive board legally could convene behind closed doors, doing so doesn't make it right. The EOB has done a lot of good work in Las Vegas by helping people escape poverty, but a bunker mentality won't help the EOB emerge from this crisis -- it will make a bad situation even worse.