Reports of the pending demise of NEON — an agency serving substantial numbers of our least fortunate citizens and their children — ought to encourage some useful soul searching. By and large, NEON has been managed by members of our local minority community who have been very well paid.
Salaries upwards of $150,000 have been reported. NEON’s Board of Directors has encompassed a fairly wide swath of the community including Common Council members. However, it’s unclear whether, over time, the Board ever maintained the oversight expected of a board, despite reported management failures to provide even the most basic financial information. NEON’s management basically had a free rein to do as it pleased, at least until federal and state auditors intervened.
What lessons can be learned? First, NEON’s failures are largely the failures of Norwalk’s minority community, especially its elected city and state officials, community leaders and activists and citizens. NEON was a “community project” and its ongoing failures widely telegraphed over an extended period. Why the community’s leadership did not become actively involved in resolving NEON’s well-advertised managerial and financial woes remains puzzling. It raises the question of how our minority community can be more involved in local governance when it can’t gather a community effort to secure a well-functioning NEON serving the least advantaged members of our community.
Second, city officials have been criticized for “not stepping in.” But given the egregious and long-lasting levels of NEON’s managerial and financial incompetence, what could they realistically have done? Would appearances of the mayor at board and/or public meetings encouraged more professional behaviors? Not likely, most would say. But city officials could have insisted for audited previous year’s financial reports, and it is here that city officials were negligent. However, financial controls have not been Norwalk’s strong point. Witness the increase of city spending by more than 50 percent over the past two decades and top salaries of city workers.
Third, what might we do to encourage more competent managerial and financial governance in a successor agency to NEON? First, rather than sit back, city officials ought to demand quarterly audited financial reports. And publicize them. Second, the public needs to “pressure” elected officials from the minority community to take a much more active role in providing guidance.
Being involved must be the watchword. Not just sit on the sidelines. And it might be helpful if our mayor attended an occasional board meeting of the successor organization assuming a standing invitation to do so.
NEON has been embarrassment to the city of Norwalk. But first and foremost it’s a failure of the minority community’s collective leadership, especially it’s elected and appointed officials’ failure to be frontally involved in ensuring sound management of the organization. Commendably, Mayor Rilling has broadened the participation of our minority population in local governance. But the real task lies before us — to encourage our minority population and its leadership to take full ongoing responsibility to make sure that NEON’s successor organization competently delivers it’s designated services with public and private funding. Neither Norwalk nor Norwalk’s minority community should tolerate another ongoing failure of leadership. It’s long past time for Norwalk’s minority community to take front line responsibility for a well-functioning provider of services previously made by NEON. That’s real issue here from NEON’s failures.
Peter I Berman
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