Two more leave Workforce Investment Board

Monday, Oct. 11, 2004 | 9:41 a.m.

Two members of the Southern Nevada Workforce Investment Board resigned last week, bringing the total departures to seven 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.

The most recent resignations -- by architect Winston Henderson and Bob Linden, president of Shred-It Las Vegas -- come in the wake of unrest recently expressed by several others who made the same move and said the board suffered from conflict and a lack of direction.

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

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

Henderson and Linden did not return calls seeking comment Friday.

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.

Brewer did not answer a call seeking comment on the recent spate of resignations, but Vice Chairman Chester Richardson said they leave a "smaller, more-informed ... more focused board."