NORWALK, Conn. – It seems there are no easy answers when it comes to Norwalk Economic Opportunity Now (NEON), the South Norwalk-based anti-poverty agency that has been teetering on bankruptcy for months.
Mayor Harry Rilling, who months ago began having every-other-day conversations with Norwalk Economic Opportunity Now (NEON) transitional CEO and President the Rev. Tommie Jackson, said Monday afternoon that nothing definitive has been decided about the Community Action Program (CAP) agency.
“That’s still under discussion now as to what’s going to happen with NEON and how the next CAP agency will evolve,” Rilling said. “Obviously there can only be one CAP agency in a community and I want to see a CAP agency evolve quickly, because the people in the city have been without services for too long a period of time. Thank goodness we were able to get Head Start back up and running, helping to bring some relief. But in my conversation with Rev. Jackson this morning, it was clear that something will be happening within the next couple of weeks, or by the first part of May. I told him that we need to sit down with all the stakeholders and formulate a plan as to what is happening and how it is happening.”
Sources have said NEON officials are struggling to decide whether they want to go Chapter 11 bankruptcy or Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Chapter 7 would mean the organization would cease to exist, while Chapter 11 would mean a reorganization.
“Beware of a chameleon,” one NancyOnNorwalk commenter said last week.
Would NEON leaders try to reinvent the agency as a new CAP agency?
“I would say probably not,” NEON board member Jack O’Dea said. “The same people involved and try to reinvent themselves? I would think probably not.”
O’Dea said there’s a need for a well-functioning CAP agency in the area.
“There’s a lot of people who need this kind of service … people with a tough lot in life, on and on and on. You need somebody to be able come in.”
O’Dea pointed to the amount of money involved in NEON when it was operating full throttle, and to the problems that seemed to follow the agency.
“You’ve got a program (with a budget) that is 12 million dollars. When you look back at the situation over so the past several years, it seems to be like an ongoing condition. … This place seems to have been a problem for some time. The frustrating thing to me is you have all these people on the board, where did they all go?” he said, referring to board members who resigned.
He also said CAP agencies in general are plagued with difficulties and traced NEON’s problems to the merger with Stamford’s CTE.
“Somebody threw the ball and NEON picked it up and ran with it. Instead of NEON picking up the ball and running with it, somebody should have tried to figure out why did CTE break down? A lot of people, good people, were involved in CTE. It’s not easy to run a $15 million program in a city. It’s not something that just happens. You look around the countryside, a lot of communities seem to start these kind of programs and a lot of them seem to go up in smoke. What is the problem? … Somebody needs to come in and take a hard-nosed look. How do you run these kinds of programs without the problem repeating itself?”
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