Friday, July 14, 2006 | 7:36 a.m.
Congress is preparing to give UNLV's embattled Institute for Security Studies another $1.5 million with instructions this time to live up to its promise to make the university a leading academic authority on homeland security.
The new windfall for the counterterrorism institute comes as it is starting to apply for some of the $5 million Congress set aside for it last November.
Criticism of the institute for failing to live up to its promise is contained in the Senate version of the energy and water appropriations bill for the 2007 fiscal year.
The Senate bill includes language - inserted by Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader and a ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee - that awards the additional $1.5 million on the condition the three-year-old institute works to make good on its pledge.
The Appropriations Committee passed the measure unanimously on June 29 and sent the bill to the full Senate.
"The committee is concerned that the ISS (Institute for Security Studies) has not adequately fulfilled its key mission objective of establishing an academic center of excellence on national security and terrorism-related issues," the Senate bill says.
"Therefore, the committee directs the ISS to allocate funding necessary to fully implement its undergraduate- and graduate-level academic program, as well as its research and training mission."
The effort to continue funding the institute with strings attached follows a June 18 Sun story that found that the organization has come up short on academics and other key objectives despite having received $8.9 million, mostly from the Energy Department, in the past three years.
Reid put the academic directive in the bill to get the institute back on track, Reid spokeswoman Sharyn Stein said.
"The senator wants to make sure that this funding is used for what it was originally intended," Stein said.
Mark Rudin, interim vice president for research and Graduate College dean at UNLV, said he was not surprised by the language.
"We've been in constant contact with Sen. Reid's office," Rudin said. "We take Sen. Reid's statements about the ISS very seriously, and we're working to address his concerns."
University Regent Steve Sisolak, who has become a critic of the institute, said he was surprised to see Congress gearing up to give the organization more federal tax dollars.
"With all of the unanswered questions, I would be hesitant, if it were my money, to invest in the institute anymore at this particular time," he said.
Sisolak, who heads the audit committee of the Board of Regents, praised Reid for taking steps to ensure that the institute spends future money on academics.
But he said he also hoped that the institute would use last year's $5 million appropriation, still at the Energy Department, on education, as well.
"It would behoove them to take the initiative to set up a plan that involved academics and apply for that money and put it to good use," Sisolak said.
Darwin Morgan, a spokesman for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration in Las Vegas, said the institute submitted a formal proposal for part of last year's $5 million allocation to his agency late last week. A total of $2.5 million became available to the institute in March, he said.
Morgan said agency rules prohibited him from disclosing at this time what the institute is asking to do with the money. And he said he also didn't know the status of the other $2.5 million, which is being distributed by the agency either at its offices in Washington or Albuquerque.
Rudin said that the institute is still in the process of preparing other funding proposals and that he didn't know the details of the Las Vegas proposal submitted last week.
But Morgan said there's no guarantee that the institute will get any of the $5 million.
"We could hold up that money if we're not satisfied that they're on track," he said.
The Nuclear Security Administration has launched an investigation into whether the institute has been properly spending the millions of dollars it has received.
The federal agency, Morgan said, plans to send the institute a letter this week seeking answers to a series of questions about the institute's dealings over the past three years.
UNLV and the Board of Regents are also conducting separate audits of the institute, and the regents have scheduled a special meeting for Aug. 4 to discuss concerns about the organization revealed in the Sun .
The institute was approved by the regents in 2003 with the promise it would be housed in the Graduate College. Instead, it became part of the UNLV Research Foundation, a private offshoot of the UNLV Foundation, the university's chief fundraising arm. Much of the money the institute has spent has been poured into technical lab research that is done by private companies.
A pilot master's program in crisis and emergency management, which graduated 17 students, has been on hold for more than a year amid questions about the quality of its curriculum and without a director. No undergraduate program was ever established.
Last week, the Sun reported that UNLV officials, after what they said was months of planning, took steps to gain direct control over all grant and contract activities of the Research Foundation and the institute. One-third of the foundation's staff was informed that their services wouldn't be needed after the transition was completed by the end of next June.
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