A long time coming

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, April 14, 2006 | 7:19 a.m.

It is item No. 91, the last one, in a three-inch-thick agenda for the April 18 Clark County Commission meeting.

It is the end of an era that has been a long time coming.

The county will vote Tuesday on temporarily taking over nearly all the once-mighty Economic Opportunity Board's six remaining programs for the poor until the state can find someone else to run them.

"We're in the process of doing away with EOB as an agency," said Lester Murray, who in January became the organization's sixth executive director in two years.

"As we say in Texas, it's time to quit blowing on the fuzz and get to the hide. We're past the fuzz and at the hide."

After several years of continuing negative audits and reviews, the loss of more than $40 million in funding, and the piling up of nearly $3 million in debt, the state is concerned about EOB's ability to manage its remaining programs.

If approved, the county would take over child care for low-income families, senior day care, housing, and family self-sufficiency classes. Other nonprofit organizations would take the EOB's drug addiction treatment program and the Women, Infants and Children nutritional and education program, Murray said.

EOB, stripped of its programs, would be left with its nonprofit radio station.

The strangest thing, though, is how closely the last act in four decades of drama resembles the first.

For nearly the entire 42 years of its existence, the Economic Opportunity Board, formed in 1964 to fight poverty, has often had either of two adjectives placed before its name - "largest" nonprofit organization in the Las Vegas Valley, and "troubled."

During those decades, EOB continued to add to its poverty-fighting portfolio - at one point amassing a cradle-to-grave array of services totaling more than 40 programs under a $60 million budget. But the organization was also in the news for mistreating many who used those programs, as well as its own employees, not to mention mismanaging millions in government funds.

Even the "final solution" to be considered Tuesday was considered before. In 1968 the County Commission attempted to take over the EOB. The commission was not happy with how the organization was handling its programs but eventually relented, placing a condition on it that the county commissioners be included on its board.

Throughout the ensuing decades, the state removed programs from it more than once when money disappeared from the organization's coffers. Repeated attempts were made to reform the board overseeing EOB and include more fiscally responsible members.

Newspaper accounts of board meetings included descriptions of shouting and fighting, a complete lack of any parliamentary procedure. Community members alleged that their needs were not taken into account. Employees quit and complained to various state and federal agencies about discrimination of one sort or another.

But somehow the organization persisted, all the while gathering more federal and state funds. It was, according to one high-ranking bureaucrat, too much trouble to dismantle the organization.

In March 2004, the Sun broke the story of EOB's inability to account for $2.1 million in state money for the child-care program - the same program the county will vote on taking over Tuesday.

Although it was never discovered where the $2.1 million went - the EOB has always commingled its grants in a single bank account - the organization was ordered to pay back the state, a debt that remains to this day.

That was the proverbial tip of the iceberg and a series of federal Freedom on Information Act requests followed, as well as information from a growing legion of disgruntled employees.

During the following two years, the Sun detailed a series of negative reports issued by federal agencies - some dating from 1997.

The organization faced increasing pressure to mend its ways as audits poured in and the Sun detailed the chaos and trouble in the anti-poverty programs across the valley.

This included a report that EOB Board Chairman Claude Logan used the Head Start early childhood program's kitchen for his own private business, a move called an act of "fraud" by a federal official, although there was no action taken against him or the EOB.

All along, the federal and state governments issued more findings, even bringing in an outside agency to run the organization for more than a year - at a cost of more than $600,000 to taxpayers.

The Sun revealed in January that the health of about 1,800 of the valley's poorest children enrolled in the Head Start program was at risk - the organization wasn't keeping track of who was sick, lacked treatment plans for those who needed them and wasn't giving everyone required checkups.

The federal government finally moved in to take the $12.5 million program away.

Throughout board members have said they "didn't know" things were being mismanaged. Alternatively, they and upper management would insist that "at least the programs were being run well" - meaning poor people were being served.

But that was belied by the accounts of nurses who spoke of children with serious illnesses falling through the cracks, or single mothers earning $7.25 an hour being charged $240 too much in monthly rent by an incompetent staff.

Meanwhile, at the organization's offices Thursday evening, Murray said the EOB's only asset will soon be KCEP 88.1-FM, a bottom-of-the-dial public radio station that plays rap, soul, gospel and less than 10 hours a week of community programming.

He spoke of the debts he will try to erase in the coming weeks with what's left of the organization's budget, including $100,000 in paid time off owed to child-care staff.

Then he mentioned that he himself will soon be out of work.

"It's the end," he said. "There's no other way to call it."