UNLV regents still in dark over secretive institute

Saturday, July 22, 2006 | 7:46 a.m.

UNLV officials, under pressure from regents and Chancellor Jim Rogers, took steps Friday to make public a heavily censored federal grant application submitted by the university's Institute for Security Studies.

The move followed a Sun story Friday that reported UNLV and institute officials had blacked out large portions of a copy of its 26-page application for $2.5 million from the U.S. Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration before giving it to the newspaper.

"From what I understand, there was no legitimate reason to withhold this from the public," said Regent Steve Sisolak, who started the move toward disclosure in a memo to UNLV officials Friday morning demanding the public release of the entire grant application.

"This calls into question their motives, and that's very troubling."

The document given to the Sun, in response to the newspaper's request, was so heavily censored that it was impossible to tell precisely how the counterterrorism institute, which has come under fire for failing to meet key academic objectives, planned to spend the federal funds. The Energy Department received an uncensored version of the application.

Rogers, who joined Sisolak in his push for public release of the full application, said he was dumbfounded by the university's censorship.

"I think it's absurd," Rogers said. "That sort of information should be out there. The public has a right to know how the money is going to be used.

"If we were going to build an A-bomb, that would be a different thing, but we're not exactly doing that."

The Sun reported Friday that, upon the advice of UNLV General Counsel Richard Linstrom, institute officials classified significant portions of the application as proprietary, prohibiting it from being disclosed publicly.

On Friday morning, Regent Mark Alden said he asked for an uncensored copy of the application but was told that the restrictions on disseminating it also applied to the regents.

"This is not good," Alden said after receiving that opinion. "This is something under our purview, and we're not even allowed to see the full document. How can we make an intelligent policy decision regarding the institute and how it spends its money?"

But as the day progressed, following Sisolak's memo and an exchange of calls among Sisolak, Linstrom and Rogers, the UNLV counsel acknowledged that the censored information probably did not need to remain confidential.

Linstrom faxed a letter to Kathy Izell, the Energy Department's chief counsel in Nevada, asking for a waiver of department policies so that the entire grant application could be made public.

"From what I saw, it seemed appropriate to me to see if we could get this waiver," Linstrom said. "It didn't appear to me to be material that was detrimental to being released, but I could be wrong."

As of late Friday afternoon, Linstrom said he had not heard back from Izell.

Sisolak, meanwhile, said Friday's events highlighted the difficulty that regents have had trying to obtain information about the embattled institute's activities the past three years.

"It looks like they lit the hoops on fire for us to jump through this time . But we're going to jump through them and get to the bottom of this."

Several audits of the institute, which so far has received $8.9 million, mostly in federal funding, are under way within the university system.

That money was intended to establish the UNLV institute as a research center and clearinghouse on homeland security - goals that, like other objectives, remain largely unmet.

Sisolak, who heads the regents' audit committee, hopes to have the results of its investigations before the regents discuss the institute's performance at a special meeting on Aug. 4.

The Nuclear Security Administration is conducting a separate probe into why the institute, while gobbling up federal funding, did not follow proper guidelines to keep the federal agency abreast of its changing anti-terrorism mission.