His job: Bring Vegas’ workforce up to speed

By Timothy Pratt

Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008 | 2 a.m.

John Ball favors stiffly starched shirts, but he’s no standard bureaucrat.

He fills in his analysis of jobs and the Las Vegas Valley’s economy with quotes from Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.” He hands out an editorial from a small-town Oregon newspaper along with his resume, detailing how county supervisors fired him in 2006 from his job as the county’s chief executive — for refusing to increase their travel budget without airing the subject in public first.

And he’s not kidding when he says his 25-year career in the public sector in Oregon and California can be summed up as: “If it’s really messed up, somebody calls me.”

When he took over 11 months ago as executive director of the Southern Nevada Workforce Investment Board — a little-known agency that channels millions in federal dollars to local nonprofit organizations to help people who need jobs or better jobs — there was a lot to fix.

Several audits had uncovered chaos in the books; one accountant said a “systemic” lack of record-keeping over three years had made it hard to track down $30 million in federal money. Three local nonprofit organizations had been overpaid a total of $86,000. State officials and workforce board staff rooted through files for a year and concluded that, despite the disorder, not a dollar in federal money had been lost and no one had broken the law. But just in case, the state Employment, Training and Rehabilitation Department took over the board’s finances in an arrangement that ended in November.

In short, Ball has had his work cut out for him.

Now he’s got a leaner budget, $6 million instead of annual sums approaching $10 million, and is looking to change everything from how his agency gives out money to how agencies across the valley can work together to help meet future needs, including filling the projected 100,000-plus jobs opening up in the next five years. We talked to him about what he’s done in his agency and how he sees the valley’s economic and social future.

How is Las Vegas different from other places you’ve worked?

In this line of work, job training and economic development, my sense is the Las Vegas Valley has been isolated for some time, and we have not felt ourselves part of a regional or a national or an international labor market. So the compulsion that most labor markets feel to be competitive in a global economy and figuring out what it takes to achieve, those are areas where we lack. People still have the sense that, “We’re here. We’re it,” because of gambling and hospitality. It’s really a narrow view of what it takes to maintain a position in the top rank of a regional labor market in a globally competitive environment. And every place that’s in this race understands that a well-funded, high-performing public education system is the key to economic competitiveness in the global economy. And Nevada is obviously still in the throes of figuring out how to implement that kind of strategy. The dropout rate here is unconscionable. You’re essentially saying to the next generation of folks, “Hey, we’re going to want you to run this race with these people that are way ahead of you — and by the way, this 30, 40, 50 percent of your peers that we didn’t figure out how to get out of high school? We want you to run this race carrying them on your back.”

What about the opinion that graduation from high school is not as important here because well-paying jobs in casinos are plentiful?

Well, the great news on that one is that major folks in that industry are looking at a high school graduation as being an entry-level threshold in their business. I think that would be a huge step forward. Because what you just said has been repeated to me many times. As an outsider walking in I’ve said, “What are you doing with this kind of dropout rate? And what are you doing about it?” And people say, “Well, it’s not a problem. People can get jobs anyway.” But I understand that high school dropouts have not been particularly successful in transitioning into that industry. And the latest numbers I’ve seen are that this industry is now about 20 percent of the labor force even in Southern Nevada, so you can see that the vast majority of the economy has to have the capacity to house the kind of sunrise industries that are going to be the driving force in the global economy of the 21st century, and that’s not going to be possible without significant improvement in both K-12 and higher education. My hope is that the board plays a role in dealing with this, by funding programs that help dropouts.

What obstacles have you faced in trying to improve the Southern Nevada Workforce Investment Board?

Whatever momentum may have been there in previous years is largely diminished. At this point the board is in the process of re-imagining itself, rethinking what it means to be effective in this labor market. The credibility in the community has to be rebuilt, that we’re an organization of integrity and impact and accountability. And the isolation that an organization that had some troubles would naturally fall into, we have to build our way out of. A key piece of the potential of these kinds of organizations is understanding that $5 (million) or $6 million sitting by itself is not going to accomplish anything. To be successful we have to be linked with all the other training and development thinking in the community that’s going on. We have to work with employers, labor and education. I think partly by virtue of our troubles we have become more isolated inside our program guidelines and functions and we have to break out of that. Another one of those mind shifts we have to make is: Is this a program about the folks who don’t have a job? Or do we shift our attention to the 95 percent of people who have a job, many of them in a position where they could significantly upgrade their career prospects if they had some training?

What about the changing demographics of the community? We have one of the fastest-growing Hispanic populations, for example.

These are huge policy issues. On this board, you’ve got eight local governments, you’ve got labor, you’ve got education and you’ve got social services. (In) very few places do you get that kind of 360-degree perspective and wisdom. So the hope is that at the policy level this group and groups like this are willing to take on the issue of, for example, what are we going to do with immigration reform? It’s going to make a huge impact on this labor market. We need to have informed, engaged and committed policy leadership from folks who are trying to lead this regional economy, and in general this community is recognizing now but has been late to plan for the rate of growth in the Hispanic population in the labor market.

Can you see that in this very board, in terms of the programs it has tended to fund?

Yes, absolutely. We’re just starting to generate data by ethnicity. I think you can see that we have not been successful in large part in that community. Though if you look at the latest data, we’re making some substantial progress in that regard. It’s a consciousness-raising process. Folks have to understand that the issue’s there and that it’s in everybody’s interest to go after it.