The Gatekeepers

Just like that, it was over.

Five months of City Hall meetings—over.

Seventy hours spent reviewing 67 applications for social-services funding—over.

Numerous weeknights poring over enough paperwork to fill eight phone books—over.

Incognito visits to see programs in action—over.

Days of vetting applications—scrutinizing things like why this group used pencil on some forms, why that group's executive director gets paid so much, why this respected nonprofit omitted sections of financial information, why that respected nonprofit is requesting tons of advertising loot when it didn't need any last year—all of that, over.

Emotional moments like the Hispanic immigrants who live behind the Stratosphere telling the Community Development Recommending Board, in the choppiest English, how they're now learning the language, or the woman in charge of a caregiver respite program who was so nervous about her presentation that she was going to address the board with her back turned—all of that, over.

Wrangling among the board's 24 members (who range from the independently wealthy to the philosophically independent) about the merits and demerits of programs; about overt partisanship ("I know they do good work"); about close-mindedness ("Don't fund this program because I don't know anyone over there")—all of that, over.

One-on-one meetings with City Council members explaining why this applicant received more money, this one got less and that one got nothing—over.

Just like that, with a simple "vote please, oppose please" from Mayor Oscar Goodman during the March 1 City Council meeting, the recommending board's job was over.

What started six months ago as a foray into citizen governance—24 appointed and unpaid volunteers tasked with recommending how the city should spend $4.2 million in social-service funds—ended with a routine unanimous vote from the council and praise from the mayor for their commitment.

Outside council chambers, the 11 board members who attended the meeting reminisced about the first meeting, about the learning curves and high level of commitment, about feeling a sense of completion as well as a desire to serve again, but mostly, about how quickly the five months flew by—over, just like that.

According to City of Las Vegas rules, the Community Development Recommending Board's general purpose is to review "all Community Development Block Grant and HOME Investment Partnerships applications for funding and make recommendations to the City Council on those applicants that should receive funding."

Board members are appointed by City Council members, serve nine-month terms and make recommendations in five funding areas: housing opportunities for people with AIDS, or HOPWA, provides states and municipalities with resources to develop long-term solutions to the housing needs of people and families with AIDS; emergency shelter grants, or ESG, funds housing, support and prevention services for the homeless; HOME works to expand the supply of safe and affordable housing; and Community Development Block Grant, or CDBG, funds are used both for construction—housing repairs and acquiring, rehabbing or building public facilities—and for public services such as childcare, life skills, social services and youth/alternative education programs.

Now, as political appointments go, spots on the recommending board lack the high profile of a vacancy on the state Supreme Court or reputation-building potential of stints on the planning commission. They're like the political version of NFL Europe: a résumé-builder, but not exactly a ticket to the big time.

You'd have thought these were paid posts—they're not—the way Martin Dean Dupalo campaigned ("Pestering is more like it," he says) for two years to get an appointment. Then again, Dupalo is the type of person who thrives on this stuff. An adjunct political science professor at UNLV, 2005 Point of Light recipient (he created a food-donation program for the Las Vegas Rescue Mission) and 1987 Harry Truman Scholar, Dupalo is wonkish to the point of cliché. Whip-smart, emotive, quirky and, at times, verbose, he tends to wax rhapsodic about the board's role: "We are the behind-the-scenes citizen volunteers who serve the community. We are often gatekeepers ensuring Las Vegas taxpayers' money is properly directed in the Las Vegas community. There's 500 years of community service and experience on this board. It's a practical brain trust of experience, leadership and community involvement." Never mind that the board only makes recommendations on a small part—between $3 million and $6 million annually; $2.2 million this year—of the city's $480 million budget for fiscal 2006.

Dupalo looks different than he sounds over the phone—taller, thicker, professorial. We meet in a back room at the Sunrise Library, where he unloads two armfuls of folders—all 67 of the 22-page applications sent to the board (most with half a dozen additional pages of corroborative materials), plus guidelines for disbursing monies in each of the five categories, plus the board's rules, plus copies of the grade sheets (up to 60 points) used by city staffers, plus outlines of the board's judging criteria (program objectives, scope of services, budget, compliance with the civil rights and disabilities laws and certifications).

It's yeoman's work, digesting all this, but Dupalo loves it, treats it with respect, attacks it with a moralistic fervor.

"We serve as an intermediary between the council and the public. We ask the tough questions and make the tough decisions on funding for the City Council," Dupalo says. "The council appreciates the board because they used to have to do this themselves. They used to argue the decisions in public. It was time-consuming and not very productive."

If there's a downer—oops, too harsh a word for the upbeat Dupalo; let's try sore spot. If there's a sore spot for Dupalo in this whole process, it's the finite amount of funds and the inability to give the have-nots more.

Take social-services funding. Sure, $609,002 was requested; but only $163,715 was available. Overall grant requests totaled $4.2million, compared to $2.2 million available.

Thus the importance of scorecards from city staff. Thus the need to see applicants in person, to hear their presentations, discern their knowledge of the programs they run. Thus the need to anonymously visit programs to see if the services they put down on paper are actually offered. Thus the value of examining applications word-for-word and line-by-line to sniff out incompetence, chicanery, even greed. Says Dupalo: "Some of the organizations can get by without our funding. For others, our funding determines whether or not their program exists."

Those are external issues. Internally, board members have to deal with the "F" word—favoritism.

First-year board member Mark Lefkowitz went to bat for the Center for Independent Living, a transitional living campus for homeless teenagers. He wanted it funded to the max, even if it left another deserving group out. "The place was clean, organized, had a nice kitchen, tough rules, a classroom atmosphere for education, computers and guidance counselors," says Lefkowitz, who owns Power Realty Development.

One of Dupalo's faves, the Key Foundation, is run by "some old curmudgeons" (his description) who help homeless veterans get jobs. That some parts of the application were handwritten and others typed mattered less than this fact: Its board members don't draw salaries.

"I love that stuff," Dupalo says, smiling wide as a mountain. "That shows their commitment. I will always fight for them to get funding."

Okay, so they disagree on who should get what—hey, that's politics, suck it up and move on. Dupalo thought Lefkowitz was pissed.

"You never can tell with rich people what they'll do if you tell them they're wrong," Dupalo says. "But Mark came to me after one of the meetings and said thank you. He developed into a fine board member."

Lefkowitz, who agreed to serve on the board at Goodman's behest, admits that he didn't know what to expect. He's got enough money to sit on his ass and not give two shits about the community. This was the first time in his 31 years in Vegas he'd worked in this capacity. So to get a sense of the programs under review, he went to places like the Salvation Army, St. Vincent's and the Center for Independent Living, standing in chow lines and seeing how people were treated.

"I became a part of helping that part of society that I'm normally blinded to," he says.

Other sore spots for board members are citizen apathy—"Our meetings are open to the public and posted according to open-meeting laws," Dupal says. "They go on for five months and no one [from the public] shows up. A few people get heartburn [when a program they run, use or support] doesn't get funding and they come to council meetings to protest. If they came to our meetings, we'd listen to them and we might fund them"—and the type of bumbling you wouldn't expect to find in big-name nonprofits: incomplete paperwork and shoddy record-keeping.

Complicating matters further, some groups with bad reputations presented stellar applications. Some with negative baggage and incomplete applications ran programs that addressed critical needs like HIV/AIDS education and prevention. Some groups whose executives are paid high salaries asked for small amounts.

"So you have an executive director earning $90,000 and the group is asking for $10,000. Why don't you just reallocate and take $10,000 of the salary?" Dupalo says. He's visibly upset.

Two stories comes to mind: An applicant requested $300,000. The group simply copied information from the previous year's application. The recommending board dressed down the representatives. Why the money was needed and where it was going, they couldn't say. Funding cut.

Different story for Classroom on Wheels. It's a familiar program to many: the white bus with black spots, educational services delivered to children in tough neighborhoods. Dupalo knew about the program. Not so for everyone on the board. C.O.W.'s former director died. Her replacement figured everyone knew about the program. She gave a curt presentation, then asked for questions.

"The problem wasn't with Classroom on Wheels," Dupalo says. "The problem was that we had new board members who weren't familiar with the program and didn't know that it was a great program and that the new director didn't do a good job of explaining anything. What do you do?"

Funding reduced.

The Center for Independent Living is in the appropriately named "homeless corridor," an area bisected by Las Vegas Boulevard and Owens Avenue. Most times of the day, you'll find throngs of indigents walking around, talking (to others or themselves) and scarfing food handed out at the Salvation Army. This afternoon there are some young faces among the grizzled countenances—teenagers, for whom the streets are also home.

Like the homeless population itself, the number of teenage indigents continues to grow. For 12 years, the Center for Independent Living has been their refuge, offering youth ages 16 to 21 a place other than a sidewalk, bus bench, cemetery or drainage ditch to sleep. Built like a small dorm, the center houses up to 36 clients at a time in its 30 studio apartments. The average stay varies from eight months to three years, during which time clients learn independent living, social and job skills and can undergo drug and alcohol counseling, all things they'll need to transition back to society. Thomas Kelly directs the home. He has a soothing, made-for-TV-voice that puts people at ease.

"Our primary focus is to create sufficient, productive citizens that will be reconnected with the community," Kelly says. "We're a stop-gap measure to keep them from crossing into the homeless adult population. It's more cost-effective to deal with it on the front end than the back end. We're needed because the number of homeless teens is growing and getting younger and more needy."

The annual budget is around $900,000. Primary funding comes from city and county grants and private and corporate donations. Kelly says monies from the recommending board help to purchase educational software, bus tokens and passes, and to obtain vital documentation like Social Security cards and birth certificates. It also makes possible transformations like that of David Johnson, a Rancho High student recently accepted into the University of Michigan engineering program. Johnson wasn't available for an interview.

"He's flying right now," Kelly boasts. "Yes, he's training for his pilot's license."

More money, Kelly says, equals more positive stories. He'd direct that money to treating teenage meth addicts. The drug is tearing through teens like a narcotized Hurricane Katrina, uprooting lives, upending entire families and making his job a lot harder.

"We can see it when the kids come off the street. Because of meth, so many young girls turn to prostitution and so many kids are addicted. I grew up in the '80s, and it's 10 times worse than the crack epidemic," he says. "We're grateful for the money we get from the board because we can do weekly outreaches to try and get these kids. But a lot more money is needed."

School. That's what the painstaking process of vetting applications is like. "We had homework every night," Dupalo says.

To be comfortable recommending $10,000 or $50,000, you should know how big the organization is, how much money goes to administrative salaries compared to service programs, if some requests came from foundations or trusts, if applicants are part of national organizations (which can help with raising funds), whether they have influential people on their boards (politicians, casino execs, lawyers—people with access to money), if the programs serve large or small segments of the populations, how budgets are put together, if clients are charged for participating, if they've misused funds, if they have image problems. Now, digest all those variables and hammer out a consensus on a board that's three-and-a-half times the size of the City Council, County Commission and Clark County School Board, twice as large as the Regents board and more than a third the size of the 63-member state Legislature.

"It was almost like a jury deliberating, because we were short of funds and there were so many good, quality applicants," Lefkowitz says.

Like Lefkowitz, Israel Fuentes has lived in Vegas for a long time (37 years), owns a business (Israel's Transmission), hadn't served in a governmental capacity prior to his stint on the board and, despite Councilman Gary Reese's hand-holding, didn't have a clue what he was doing. "Four days after his appointment," says Fuentes, who's on his second board term, he was named chairman.

"I said okay. Am I in trouble? What did I do?"

Not to worry. He was energized by the thought of putting money where it's needed, learning about various social service programs and having the chance to guide public discourse, something he couldn't dream of doing in his native Guatemala. Fuentes has his own internal scorecard for applicants. Weighed heavily are a program's breadth (how far and wide does it reach) and its impact on children and the elderly, "the neediest of us." But he also knows the value of compromise: Don't expect someone else to like a program because you like it.

"Once you're on the board, it becomes an obligation. Whoever selected you is basically saying, ‘Be there. Be my voice.' It becomes a great responsibility because you want to make sure every single penny is used," Fuentes says. "The previous chairman helped me through my year [as chairman]. Dean hasn't been the best chairman; he's had to learn a lot, but he takes every single program seriously. The more you are in it, the more friends you meet. It's sort of a brotherhood. Your opinions are respected. You make good friends. You are part of something very important. I want to do it for five years or more."

"I love this type of stuff." Dupalo is holding the briefing sheet for Give Me A Break Inc., which provides five hours of respite services to people who care for individuals with disabilities and those at risk of abuse or neglect. Once a month, trained Give Me A Break volunteers relieve caregivers—typically parents or siblings—of their burdens.

What Dupalo loves as much as the group's mission is this page in the application: Line Item Categories. "Look at this." He's pointing to the request for $5,200 for insurance. "This in our No. 1 priority," the application reads. "Without insurance, we cannot provide care."

"They're not asking for anything they don't need," he says.

Scherrie Adams-Ambre is executive director of the six-year-old Give Me a Break, whose impetus was when several people, both disabled and parents of children under age 2 with disabilities, formed a support group after repeatedly crossing paths at therapy sessions. They set up a board, secured funding from United Way, the Children's Trust Fund and the city of Las Vegas and worked out use of the Tinker Town Day Care. Besides respite for caregivers, Give Me A Break runs a 24-hour crisis line and makes referrals to other social-service agencies.

"Sometimes parents don't see that they need to take a break to be a better parent," Adams-Ambre says.

While Adams-Ambre can negotiate and barter on things like office space and won't turn away clients who can't pay the nominal $5-per-family fee, there's no way around paying liability insurance, which is where the recommending board's funds come in. Normally confident—which comes through in the well-written and detailed application—Adams-Ambre was all nerves come time to present to the board. She considered picturing everyone naked, but aborted that plan, fearing she might laugh. Dupalo said she could turn her back to the board. Considered that, too.

"I didn't turn my back. I just took a deep breath and told myself not to talk too fast," she says. "I think I did well."

She did.

Back at the City Council Meeting: After city Neighborhood Services Department Director Orlando Sanchez extols the recommending board's virtues, Dupalo steps to the dais. He's been told to keep it brief. Fat chance. Earlier in the City Council meeting, he tells me he's going to introduce everybody and launch into a commencement-type speech about the board. After all, you can't distill five months of work and growth and emotion and tough decisions into five minutes—it can't be over just like that.

Recommending board co-chair Doug DeMasi at his side, Dupalo finishes in a few minutes. See, he does listen. Goodman has the 11 board members in attendance come up and introduce themselves. Job well done. Their work is over.

Time to get this thing over, too.

But such is the small-town nature of this city that one motion to accept the board's funding recommendation turns into eight motions because various council members have to disclose ties to groups like Catholic Charities (Larry Brown and Lois Tarkanian) and EOB, Barry's Boxing and the Anthony Pollard Foundation (Larry Weekly). They finally get it all worked out.

Now it's over.

Outside City Hall, the board members exchange pleasantries, make sure they have correct phone numbers and rejoice. Some talk about doing it all again. Dupalo seems content. There's satisfaction in his smile, a hint of pride and finality in his voice. It's over, but not really.

"Our process alleviates the City Council in [terms of] time and possible political pitfalls," he says, sounding like he's ready to fry bigger political fish.

Everybody parts ways, smiling. And just like that, it's over.