EOB cleanup is behind schedule

By Timothy Pratt

Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004 | 11:21 a.m.

A team with a nearly quarter-million-dollar contract to clean up the Economic Opportunity Board is behind schedule in delivering on its promises, but conversations are under way to extend the team's contract up to four months, officials said.

The team's progress report at the EOB monthly board meeting Monday and an interview with the organization's interim executive director, Mary Twitty, made clear that at least a half-dozen key financial and administrative deadlines had not been met.

The team would be asked to continue its work solving problems cited in three negative reviews of the Economic Opportunity Board's nearly $60 million organization, board spokesman state Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, said Friday, "just in case they haven't reached deadlines."

The team's current budget -- which pays for Twitty, fiscal director Dan Miller and various consultants -- includes salaries of $650 a day, nearly $20,000 for weekend flights home for team members and nearly $15,000 in airport parking, car rentals and transportation to and from the airports.

Twitty, one of the principal members of the Mid-Iowa Community Action Inc. -- or MICA -- team, said "a lot of things have come up that we didn't anticipate," and that the EOB was being brought out of the chaos described in government reviews.

The EOB received nearly $60 million in taxpayer funds to fight poverty last year.

The team's deadlines come from its "corrective action plan," the cornerstone of the team's stay and the principal measure -- along with continued government funding of the organization -- by which it will be determined if the EOB's many problems have been solved.

But the team still has not named new board members, begun the search for a new executive director or other top-level administrators, or completed the organization's 2003 fiscal audit. Another point in the plan -- formally training the board, which oversees the millions that pass through the organization -- also has not been completed because the organization was waiting for new board members to be chosen, Twitty said.

Twitty said Monday that ads for a new human resource director should be published this week.

As for the audit, Neal said, "We got an extension and we're not worried about it."

All of those actions had September or Oct. 1 deadlines.

Neal said failure to meet the deadlines doesn't reflect badly on the team nor does it affect the organization's day-to-day work.

"We made these mandates for ourselves and just because we haven't met them doesn't mean we won't," he said.

The team gets $224,000 in taxpayer money under its July 7 to Nov. 26 contract. Gary Gobleman, of the grants management unit in the state's Human Resources Department, said the contract may be extended to March 31.

"The money part we haven't discussed," Gobleman said, nor is it clear which funds would pay for the team's extended stay.

Twitty said it was up to the state and the EOB board to decide "if they want to send us home or not."

Though Twitty said the MICA team's seen many unknowns, the same team conducted one of the three reviews EOB faced earlier this year.

Twitty and Miller took part in that review, which produced a detailed list of problems and possible solutions -- including bringing in an outside team to manage the agency. That outside team wound up being Twitty, Miller and other consultants from their group.

Monday's meeting also included a new policy on credit cards, months after it was first promised. Faulty and missing records on organization credit cards were cited in the reviews, though no exhaustive investigation of the use of those cards was ever completed, Twitty said.

The new policy defines what purchases can be made with the organization's 18 to 20 credit cards -- travel, emergencies that may disrupt programs or affect licenses to run programs and anything the executive director determines is essential -- and puts a total cap on credit of $48,000.

The meeting also included changes to the organization's by-laws, including the idea of a group that would "investigate board members when they are out of sync," Twitty said.

That committee has not yet been formed.

Twitty said the plan could always be revised later.