EOB fails to meet federal deadlines

Tuesday, May 18, 2004 | 11:01 a.m.

The troubled Economic Opportunity Board -- the Las Vegas Valley's largest nonprofit organization -- has failed to meet two important deadlines for providing financial information to the federal Head Start bureau, said Windy Hill, associate commissioner for the agency.

In a March 18 letter, the regional Head Start office in San Francisco had warned the EOB that if the local organization did not supply quarterly expenditure reports and a plan to fix problems pointed out in 2002 audit, the EOB could lose the more than $12 million early childhood program for low-income families. The letter also put the EOB on notice that it was being placed on "high-risk status" due to problems managing the program.

That status meant the EOB had to "give us certain things by certain times," Hill said. The deadlines were April 30 for the quarterly reports and May 1 for the plan. As of Monday, none of the required information had been received by the federal officials, Hill said.

In the coming days the federal agency is to release the results of the four-day review it conducted of the EOB last month, and the failures to meet the deadlines do not bode well for the organization, Hill said.

The missed deadlines are "not a good sign," Hill said.

Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, a longtime member of the board of directors of the EOB and its current spokesman, said Monday that he thought "all reports that were requested by the regional office have been prepared."

But as to whether the reports requested were supplied before their respective due dates, Neal said, "I don't know whether the deadline was met."

"It's not important to me," he added.

Ron Herndon, chairman of the board of the National Head Start Association, a group representing most of the nation's nearly 2,600 Head Start programs, said it should be important.

"When they say high-risk, that's very serious -- normally the next step is to pull the grant," he said.

The nonprofit organization's lack of response to the federal agency will be treated as "additional information in trying to assess its capacity to run the Head Start program," Hill said. She said she expected the report on EOB to be finished "soon."