Three more leave workforce board

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, Oct. 11, 2004 | 11:41 a.m.

Three more members of the Southern Nevada Workforce Investment Board have resigned, bringing the total number of departures to eight since a late-September board meeting.

The four-year-old public organization distributes about $15 million in federal funds annually to different nonprofit organizations in the Las Vegas Valley that help people get jobs.

Board chairman Bob Brewer said this morning he was "concerned" about the resignations -- and the apparent dissatisfaction behind some of them -- and would be talking the departing board members "to better understand their reasons."

"They haven't said anything to me," he said of board members who have left in recent days.

The most recent resignations -- by architect Winston Henderson, Bob Linden, president of Shred-It Las Vegas, and Leslie Ciski, of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development -- came in the wake of unrest recently expressed by several others who made the same move. Those who had previously resigned said the board suffered from internal conflict and a lack of direction.

Echoing those sentiments, Linden complained, in a letter to Brewer, about "frequent disruptive behavior and what I view to be non-productive discussion ... at most of the quarterly Board meetings."

The board, Linden said, had made "negligible progress in movement toward a more strategic level of performance" in the last 24 months.

Similarly, Ciski -- whose letter of resignation was sent to Brewer over the weekend -- wrote, "I feel as a board, the WIB has made minimal progress, at best."

The board's by-laws say its "principal responsibility ... (is) to establish policy and provide guidance for strategic planning activities."

At least half of its members must be from the private, for-profit sector, with local elected officials, education, religion and labor also represented.

Its by-laws also say the board must have at least 50 members; Brewer said its staff would be working on replacing those who have left.

Board Vice Chairman Chester Richardson said the resignations leave a "smaller, more-informed ... more focused board."