EOB has new director, but same troubles to address

Friday, July 29, 2005 | 9:02 a.m.

The Economic Opportunity Board, after more than a year of heavy turnover and searing federal reviews, had its first board meeting under a new director Thursday -- and faced many of the same issues that brought on troubles in the first place.

The EOB board discussed debts of around $2.3 million brought about by what a federal review called mismanagement; the need for a system to track millions in taxpayer-funded grants; and the hopes of saving a federally-funded program -- Head Start -- that the government has threatened to take away from the organization.

It was the first meeting with the new executive director, Jean Childs, who worked as director of the organization's Head Start program from 1972 to 1996, and was brought back to set things straight only this month.

In her first meeting before the board of the the valley's largest nonprofit organization, a series of reforms were considered. Most of them had been identified as urgent by the outside reviews -- and some board members who have left the organization -- years ago.

But the present board -- half of whom have been with the organization for years -- reacted Thursday as if they were hearing about the issues for the first time.

When the EOB's recently-hired chief financial officer, Lister Chua, laid out a plan for clearly identifying how money goes from different grants to each program, and how salaries are paid by different grants, Eloiza Martinez, board treasurer, asked, "That's not being done now?"

Then the board began pointing fingers at a group of consultants who ran the organization's day-to-day affairs for a year -- at a price tag of about $625,000 in taxpayer funds -- before Childs was brought in.

Board member William Robinson asked, "What did we pay them for?"

Childs said her goals in the coming months are:

The EOB's debt includes $552,000 owed to the state for advances given the organization years ago to pay off child-care centers -- a process that the state took away from the EOB after its many troubles.

The EOB still decides what families are eligible for affordable child-care, but the United Way now pays the child-care centers.