Housing chief to be reviewed in public

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Thursday, April 13, 2006 | 7:12 a.m.

At the last minute Wednesday the North Las Vegas Housing Authority board backed off a plan to evaluate the agency's top employee behind closed doors, fearing a violation of the open meeting law.

The board had listed on the agenda for its regularly scheduled monthly meeting a closed session for Chief Executive Don England's annual performance evaluation.

England said the item was pulled from the agenda after a call from the state attorney general's office, which was prompted by a query from the Sun.

"I told him it was fairly clear that they couldn't do this in closed session," Senior Deputy Attorney General Keith Marcher said.

The move would have been in violation of a provision in the law that took effect in October, which prohibits evaluations of public agency directors from being done in private.

Barry Smith, executive director of the Nevada Press Association, said evaluations of top government officers should be done in public.

"These are people paid with taxpayer money and certainly how they do their job is a big decision for any public body and in determining how that body does its job - (so) this has to got to be the public's business," Smith said.

England oversees the agency, one of three public housing authorities in the valley charged with providing affordable housing to low-income residents, and its $14 million budget.

The board will evaluate him next month in an open session.

Wednesday's last-minute switch was the second time in a year the agency has run into problems with the open meeting law. Last April, the agency failed to post notice of a meeting on the Internet, another requirement of the open meeting law.

England said he "wasn't aware" of the amendment to the law on job evaluations and that the housing authority's legal staff also "probably didn't know" about it.

"It's not exactly something we read every day," he said.

The Legislature changed the law last year in response to a controversy over closed-door meetings held by the university system Board of Regents. Regents discussed the actions of several people - including Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, then a system employee - without notifying them.

North Las Vegas Councilman William Robinson, who serves as the chairman of the housing authority, said he hadn't looked at the agenda for the meeting before Wednesday afternoon, but that he also didn't know of the change in the law.

"Not everybody's aware of it," he said.

But Smith said that public agency directors and boards should be up on such things.

"I would think it would be part of your job to notice," he said. "These things aren't supposed to be done in the dark."