Urban League can’t salvage plan to train ex-cons

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, March 27, 2009 | 2 a.m.

After consuming $350,000 in public money, an Urban League project that was supposed to create jobs has collapsed under the weight of power struggles and infighting.

This comes after 22 months of planning and the creation of a separate nonprofit corporation for managing the project, which was aimed at training and hiring former felons and pumping money into West Las Vegas.

But in the past month the project lost its director and half its board of directors while the Las Vegas Clark County Urban League scuttled its business plan.

The opportunities lost also include at least $585,000 in upcoming grants for furthering the project’s goals.

“It was a great idea ... but it’s all fallen apart,” said Rick Tremblay, regional director of the Economic Development Administration, a federal agency that was in talks with the Urban League about a $412,000 grant.

The project hinged on the Urban League creating a corporation called Revive Enterprises Inc. and was launched in May 2007 with seed money from the Nevada Economic Development Fund.

The central idea was for Revive to buy an auto repair shop that would be used for training and as a workplace.

Power struggles have derailed the idea in recent months, particularly since the November naming of Steven Brooks as chairman of the Urban League board, according to several people connected to the project. Brooks, a liaison for Las Vegas City Councilman Ricki Barlow, has denied repeated requests for comment on the Revive situation.

Bob Paisano, chairman of the Revive board, said Brooks wanted to rewrite Revive’s bylaws to take more control of the corporation. Paisano said he was against the idea. Amid that struggle, the Urban League’s board stalled for months on approving the auto repair shop deal. Paisano lamented the morass, calling it “micromanaging.”

The result is that nearly two years after the grant launched, “it’s not any closer to achieving the end goal,” Paisano said.

That was last week. In the days that followed, the Urban League fired Bill Losch, an Urban League employee listed with the Nevada secretary of state’s office as Revive’s sole official in charge of day-to-day affairs. And the Urban League’s interim president, Clifton Marshall, sent a letter to First Choice Business Brokers, the firm brokering the sale of the auto repair shop, indicating that the Urban League had no intention of approving the purchase.

Losch said he was told he was fired for “insubordination,” which to him meant seeking reasons for the stops and starts in the project. He noted that the project’s collapse leaves unresolved questions on three pots of public money.

One holds $20,000 for escrow on the auto repair shop deal, another has $50,000 for completing the purchase, and the third has $16,000 for closing costs, Losch said.

It is unclear who gets this money now — the Urban League, the state or, in the case of escrow, the auto repair shop.

As for Revive, Paisano’s board had lost four members as of Wednesday — including Brooks and La Sonia Burks, a senior vice president of Community Bank of Nevada.

The agenda for the Urban League’s board meeting Wednesday included a report from an ad hoc committee created to make a recommendation on the Revive project’s future. Urban League board member Napoleon McCallum’s report consisted of a recommendation to table the committee due to “discrepancies.” The motion was roundly approved.

The meeting ended with police arriving and clearing out the audience, which included people linked to the failed project.