EOB ignores own bylaws in paring down board

Thursday, May 27, 2004 | 11 a.m.

In an Economic Opportunity Board meeting Wednesday riddled with irregularities -- including being closed to the public at the last minute -- eight members of the group that governs the nearly $60 million nonprofit organization decided who gets to stay on the board and who leaves, an effort to clean house and start anew.

The board members who get to remain are: Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas; Las Vegas City Councilman Lawrence Weekly; Rev. Marion Bennett; Claude E. Logan; Eloiza Martinez; and Vicente Herrera. Neal and Weekly represent government on the board, Bennett and Logan represent the poor that the EOB is intended to serve, and Martinez and Herrera represent the business community.

Neal said he will have to step down from the board when his Senate term is over, unless he is successful in his bid for a seat on the Clark County Commission.

The meeting that narrowed the board down to six members appeared to violate at least five of the organization's bylaws. The apparent violation caused the leader of a national organization that groups together 1,000 federally funded, poverty-fighting agencies such as the EOB to question the validity of the decision to keep six of the 12 board members who have survived turmoil facing the organization in recent months.

The closing of such a meeting and making important decisions behind closed doors are "just not done," said Paul Dole, chairman of the board of the National Community Action Partnership, a Washington-based nonprofit organization.

"These meetings are usually held out in the open ... and need to be held by the books ... or the members of the corporation can be held liable," Dole said.

But Neal, the temporary spokesman for the EOB, told the Sun after the meeting, "We don't have to follow no damned bylaws when everything is changing ... and don't come up with no bull---- about no bylaws."

Neal said that the organization was complying with the first recommendation contained in a timeline that came out of a state-ordered inquiry into the EOB's problems with keeping track of money and managing some 30 programs. The inquiry's results were released late last month.

That recommendation was for the EOB to break its board down to three members and then build it back up again, but the organization and the state agreed in a May 21 meeting to compromise on the number of six.

The organization's board historically has had 15 members, but there was one longstanding vacancy and three other members stepped down in recent months.

During that period, the organization has also been the subject of two federal inquiries and one state-ordered, federally funded inquiry. It has also lost at least six upper-management employees.

"We have a problem and we have to take care of the problem. We did it, and it's done," Neal said, referring to the state's recommendation and Wednesday's decision.

But Dole wondered how the state could accept a decision made in such an irregular meeting.

"Most states would not recognize that action," he said.

State officials could not be reached for comment on the matter.

Chester Richardson, one of the members who was booted off the board, said Wednesday's meeting was frustrating.

"What's the use of having bylaws if the agency doesn't follow them?" Richardson said.

"That is an indication of what is wrong with the leadership of this agency -- their inability to follow the rules."

Claude Logan, chairman of the board, said that Wednesday's meeting was a "special board meeting," not a "regular board meeting" -- despite it being held on the day and at the hour that regular board meetings have been held for years.

Two articles of EOB's bylaws state that such special meetings may be called by having a written notice signed by six board members and sent to the rest of the board no less than five days in advance of the meeting. At least three board members, when asked, said they received no written notice of the meeting.

The bylaws also state, "All regular and special board meetings shall be open to the public except those portions concerned with personnel matters."

Decisions about the board and its make-up are not personnel matters, Dole and Richardson said. Personnel matters involve paid employees, they said.

Finally, there is a process defined in the bylaws for removing board members. That process was not followed in Wednesday's meeting, where, Neal said, "a majority vote" was the method used to arrive at the list of six new board members.

The bylaws said board members could only be removed for cause, such as excessive absences or breach of fiduciary duty. A special meeting would then have to be called, under the procedures set forth in the bylaws, which involves, among other things, notifying the targeted board member by certified mail.

At the close of the meeting, Herrera -- who works at a Las Vegas mortuary -- said he was "sorry about how the meeting was handled," referring to the doors closing to the public.

"That's not the way I like to do things," he said.

Richardson said he will make administrative complaints to the attorney general's office and the secretary of state, as well as to the Department of Health and Human Services, the organization's main funding source.

"This is all part of the EOB's destructive denial that it has to adhere to any kind of oversight," he said.