Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

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Agencies’ good intentions, poor finances

0531Urban

Sam Morris

Clark County Urban League accountant John O’Rourke, left, and finance committee member Maj. William Raihl stand to address members at a meeting last month.

At one point in the Southern Nevada Workforce Investment Board’s occasionally contentious meeting Wednesday, Las Vegas Councilman Steve Ross became somewhat defensive.

A few too many agenda items were making the agency look bad; Ross wanted to make sure it was clear where the fault lay.

“We’re doing everything right,” board member Ross boomed. “Be mindful of the financial messes this board was in the previous 18 to 24 months.”

Actually, the agency, which gets millions in federal dollars to train people for jobs, was in trouble for longer than that. In 2006, one accountant said the board had displayed a “systemic” lack of record-keeping for three years, placing a question mark over at least some of about $30 million in public money.

So it’s no surprise that 14 months after acquiring a new, reform-minded executive director and showing many others the door, the agency would still be cleaning up messes. At the board’s quarterly meeting Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of dollars were either haggled over or written off as losses.

That includes a bullet Executive Director John Ball will have to bite for at least a few more months: $25,000 a month in rent, when he thinks the agency could get by paying less than $10,000. The higher rent buys nearly 11,000 square feet of office space; Ball figures the agency could fit into 3,500. The Workforce Investment Board has been locked into the lease at its South Rancho Drive location since 2005, with the supersized $300,000 deposit refundable only after three years. Ball hopes to seal a deal on a cheaper, smaller space by July 1.

He speculates the cavernous digs may have been chosen because the agency felt flush at the time, having gotten increases in federal funding for four years running. That trend was reversed in 2005, however, and the funding didn’t go back up until this year. The allotment to the agency is based on unemployment rates and lost jobs.

Other “messes” Ball, his staff and the governing board of 35 are left with: $200,000 that the feds say was never paid in 2006 to a now-defunct nonprofit organization called Nevada Business Services; nearly $35,000 that the agency’s bookkeepers neglected to pay employees in overtime from 2005 to 2007; $4,200 in COBRA payments that former Executive Director Richard Blue never paid back.

•••

On the same day across town, the Las Vegas-Clark County Urban League’s board got an earful during its monthly meeting about how to better manage its millions while serving the poor.

The nonprofit organization is officially four years old but has only begun gobbling up grants, Pacman-like, in the past 18 months, en route to its current $4.5 million budget.

At the meeting, held in the new Clark County-funded, Urban League-run Pearson Community Center, accountant Lynda R. Keeton laid out the results of her recent “internal controls assessment.”

If you think you’re spotting a trend in the recent history of the two groups examined in this story, you’re right. Agencies that get a lot of public money often have trouble “controlling” that money.

Keeton didn’t mince words, which were also costly — she charged $10,000 for two weeks of work in late April at the Urban League.

Twelve board members — two-thirds the roll, standard attendance — intently listened to those words, which were meant to show “what’s under the carpet,” Keeton said.

“There’s a lack of segmentation of duties ... a need for financial controls,” she said.

Then, trying to leaven the news with smiles, she added, “The accounting group is a little dysfunctional.”

Keeton suggested the organization hire a comptroller and not fill the recently vacated position of chief financial officer. But that was just the start of the list. The group should also outsource the payroll, get rid of its $40,000 state-recommended accounting software, do a time check on employees to figure out who’s doing what, and make sure the departments handling grants, accounting and programs talk to one another.

Ray Clarke, executive director, said he was onboard with all of it, as were state officials who are passing down federal money to the organization.

“We have always said we have nothing to hide,” Clarke said.

The Sun requested a copy of Keeton’s assessment Wednesday and each day afterward, but as of 5 p.m. Friday had not received the report.

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