Urban League takes a shot at developing its own priorities

By Timothy Pratt

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 | 2 a.m.

What a difference $46,000 doesn’t make.

Ten months ago, the Las Vegas-Clark County Urban League, a $4.5 million nonprofit organization, spent that much money on a strategic plan.

The state Health and Human Services Department told the group to develop a blueprint for positioning itself to be the Las Vegas Valley’s largest poverty-fighting organization. So it chose Gary Stokes of Mountain Consulting to do the job. The result: 10 pages with references to strategies, outcome, three-year indicators, Year One benchmarks — but few specifics.

Now the organization’s board has decided to do it all over again — for free.

A report submitted by a committee of three at the board’s April 23 meeting noted that the strategic plan should have “more emphasis placed on results” and ensure benchmarks are attained.

Kathleen Paustian, spokeswoman for the local Urban League, says the two versions will form “an ongoing, living document — not one replacing the other.”

The first report, the $46,000 one, outlined part of the next two years for the Urban League in the following way: Complete a plan to address poverty in the first year and seek funding for it; present the plan to “the community” and “coordinate internal and external programs” in the second year.

There’s little to no elaboration on any of that. The report doesn’t say what the community is, doesn’t say what those programs are or how to determine whether they are coordinated.

Its benchmarks included “seventy-five percent or more of programs ... achieve program objectives.”

The first draft of the new plan refers to a series of specific programs, though it’s still not clear how the success of those programs will be measured.

There’s no “75 percent of the people in job training program X will find jobs within six months and hold those jobs for at least six months,” for example.

The three-person committee is awaiting opinions from the other 15 board members about the newest version of the plan. Time will tell whether the volunteers can do better than the company hired with public money.

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As federal and local officials predicted might happen, 40 families swept up last summer in a massive federally ordered eviction from North Las Vegas’ Buena Vista Springs apartments must now pack their bags again. FBI background checks found they have criminal records disqualifying them from federal housing programs, including convictions for domestic violence, attempted murder with a deadly weapon, possession of marijuana and child abuse. The news causes more chaos for the families, about one-fifth of the 212 hit by the largest such eviction in Las Vegas Valley history. It is the latest development in a confusing series of events that began in August, when the federal Housing and Urban Development Department notified the families they would have to leave Buena Vista because the property’s landlord had failed five inspections in four years. The federal government said it would no longer subsidize substandard housing.

So about 800 poor people, mostly single mothers and their children, got Section 8 vouchers to find new housing — with a catch. Normally, participants in the program, which gives families vouchers that cover up to 100 percent of the rent, must first pass criminal background checks. In the case of the eviction from Buena Vista, HUD, working with the Clark County Housing Authority and at least a half-dozen other agencies, allowed families to move right into new apartments.

Initial checks using Metro Police records showed that 144, or about two-thirds of the families, had records that could disqualify them from Section 8. More in-depth FBI checks were ordered. The results came back this year and the housing authority has been sending notices and handling appeals to the notices since February, Executive Director Nancy Wesoff said. She and others involved in this case had noted that these criminal backgrounds should have disqualified families from living at Buena Vista in the first place, but someone, somehow, dropped the ball.

Some who work with current and former prisoners question the wisdom of the rules governing federal housing. Mujahid Ramadan, a local activist who has worked in valley prisons for seven years, has said “the troubling outcome of federal policy is that you may wind up having people homeless.”

When this happens, social decay sets in: Children fail in school, families fall apart and poverty leads to more crime. “So there is a human cost and you can tag onto that a financial cost” to society, he said.

“It would only be wise to do something preventive.”