EOB team receives more time

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004 | 11:31 a.m.

A team that fell behind on a five-month plan to clean up the Economic Opportunity Board was given seven more months to do the job Monday, at a price tag of nearly $400,000 in taxpayer funds.

The decision was reached by the four remaining board members of what was once a body of 15 that oversees the nonprofit EOB, an organization that wielded nearly $60 million in 2003 to fight poverty in the valley.

"I'm happy the board made its decision and am pleased with the progress we've made," said Mary Twitty, interim executive director of the EOB and a member of the team, which comes from another nonprofit organization known as Mid-Iowa Community Action, Inc.

The team so far has cost taxpayers about $224,000 -- money which included consultant salaries of $650 a day, $20,000 in flights back and forth to the home states of team members, and $15,000 in airport parking, car rentals, and transportation to and from McCarran International Airport and airports in the home states of consultants.

The board -- which lost former state Sen. Joe Neal and community member Vicente Herrera in recent weeks -- reached the decision to extend the contract after the so-called MICA team gave a run-through of what it had done since coming to the EOB in July.

The team was handed the task of correcting negative federal reviews of programs to help the poor and answering hosts of questions about the organization's finances.

And though deadlines were not met for elements of the team's corrective action plan, such as bringing the organization new executive and financial directors, beefing the board back up to 12, training the board and finishing a 2003 audit, Twitty said much had been accomplished.

That included billing government agencies for $600,000 owed to the EOB, selling a downtown property for a net gain of about $400,000 and satisfying one of the organization's federal funding agencies -- the Department of Housing and Urban Development -- that things had been cleared up from a negative review.

The organization also answered a negative review by the Head Start bureau -- source of about $12 million for the EOB's early childhood program -- but hasn't heard from the federal agency yet about that agency's conclusions, Twitty said.

Another step approved at Monday's board meeting was the naming of two new board members -- North Las Vegas Councilman William Robinson and Asian Chamber of Commerce member Arthur De Joya.

But Twitty also said she didn't know if the state was going to continue to fund the EOB's largest program -- child care for poor families, which costs about $20 million a year. The state has requested proposals from other organizations for running that program.

If that money doesn't come in -- particularly the $1.5 million month-by-month advance it brings -- that loss, together with the cutting-off in recent months of what was once $3 million in a bank line of credit, would level significant blows to the organization's financial infrastructure.

The team's next seven months -- up to June 30 -- will cost about $367,000, according to the board. That money will come from federal and state sources still to be named.

During that time, new top-level administrators will be named and many of the goals in the team's original timeline will be met, Twitty said.

The EOB's new executive director will be sought in a national search and could result in a hire by May.

"Once we name a new executive director," Twitty said, "we won't need to be here every day."