Housing authority remains behind on bills

The Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority's failure to pay bills on time has become such a problem that several agencies have threatened to suspend services, according to documents obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

However, officials with the agency that provides public housing to low-income families claim progress has been made in addressing the delays.

Internal emails and invoices from 2014 and 2015 from Clark County and various small businesses to housing authority staff show the agency at times has allowed certain bills for automobile fleet services, security services and cleaning services to go unpaid for months.

"Are you going to try to get me paid or do I need to send a letter requesting payment as this is a bit ridiculous," wrote David Johnson, manager of Clark County's automotive division, in a Feb. 10, 2015 email to Michael Gentry, a housing authority procurement specialist. Johnson was inquiring about six months of past due invoices totaling $27,323 for automobile fleet services.

The housing authority receives about 22,000 invoices a year from more than 800 vendors, Executive Director John Hill said. About 95 percent of bills are paid within 30 days, he asserted. That's up from about 65 percent to 70 percent of bills that were paid on time when the Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Clark County housing authorities merged in 2010, officials said. The housing authority is a public entity with about 98 percent of its funding coming from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The remaining funding sources include local government funding.

"We are not dealing with small potatoes here," he said in August.

The agency gets about 400 to 500 invoices a week, said Hill, who has tried to streamline the payment process since his hire in 2010.

Carole Vilardo, president of the Nevada Taxpayer's Association, said Tuesday that if a public agency is not paying its bills on time, it shows that it's not managing its money well.

"It is not acceptable for any governmental agency to be behind in payments," said Vilardo, whose association promotes responsible government. "I would hope that some remediation in the actions of the authority would be taken expeditiously."

Late Payments

In 2010 and again in 2014, Hill ordered all vendors to send bills one of two ways: to the finance department's post office box address or to an email address created for billing purposes. A system was also set up to track when housing authority bills are paid.

During a board meeting on Oct. 16, 2014, commissioners were critical of the late-payment issue. Commissioner Dora LaGrande said she didn't care how many bills the housing authority's finance department has to pay because that's their job.

"People need to be held accountable (when) they need to be held accountable and stop making excuses for why they don't do what they do," according to the meeting minutes.

No one had been disciplined at that time.

"We cannot have our residents paying any price for anything we didn't do in a timely manner, so whatever has to be done, needs to be done," Chairman Robert Noyes said during that meeting. "We shouldn't have to talk about this again."

But late-payment problems still persist.

The county was eventually paid the $27,323 owed for delinquent automobile fleet services' costs accrued by the housing authority from August 2014 to January 2015. Eight months later, the county once again was owed for another six months of overdue bills.

As of Aug.26, the housing authority owed Clark County a total of $17,452 for past due invoices from January to July for automobile fleet services.

"We did the work, we would like to be paid," said Johnson, who contacted the housing authority on Aug. 26. "It requires additional effort from administrative staff to follow up to make sure we are getting paid."

By Aug. 26 in the afternoon, the housing authority had paid the county about $10,000. The city of Las Vegas also provides fleet services, but the housing authority has been up to date with those bills, said city spokesman Jace Radke. The city of North Las Vegas doesn't provide those services to the housing authority.

Hill said the issue with those bills was that the county was sending emails with attachments that proved confusing to staff who had to click on them to see the bill. But agency officials weren't aware of that until Aug. 26.

"We learned something today, and now our staff has been informed," Hill said.

But Clark County is not the only entity pressing for payment from the housing authority this year.

It took almost a month of emailing and calling the agency for Kevin Leach, branch manager for Las Vegas Cypress Private Security, to be paid for past due expenses that totaled about $70,000, according to documents. He handled the issue because his "accounting department was not having any luck in getting responses to their inquiries."

Eventually, an email was sent to staff, including Hill, saying that due to "multiple failed attempts" as of Feb. 6, 2015, services would be suspended "to all properties that have past due invoices until payment for these invoices was received."

The late payments sometimes had ripple effects on small businesses such as Dana's Mechanical LLC.

"I cannot stress how hard this is on a small business, because we have to pay our employees and vendors in a timely manner, and a lot of times when we do not receive timely payments, our company has to rely on high-interest loans to meet our commitments," Cheryl A. Prach, owner and bookkeeper said in a Feb. 18 email to a housing authority commissioner.

Senior Cleaning was in a similar situation.

"I am a small business owner and not receiving payment per contract term is starting to hurt me financially in paying my employees," wrote Stephanie Lucero, owner of the cleaning service company, in a March 3 email to a housing authority commissioner.

In March, TGI Painting also had bills that were up to 111 days past due. Owner Thomas Giambattista said the issue has since been addressed and he hasn't had any other problems.

Responding to Vendors

A 2014 investigation concluded that the housing authority's finance department was unresponsive. On Aug. 26, when the housing authority's director of finance Fred Haron was asked by the Review-Journal why he wasn't responsive to billing inquiries, Hill did not allow him to speak.

Hill intervened, saying: "What we want to do is be responsive to our vendors."

Housing Authority Board of Commissioners Vice Chairman Sanje Sedera said if the problem of not paying invoices on time continues, it's Hill's responsibility to address it. Some of the bills were not going to the appropriate place and the agency was entering the wrong dates for some of the billing. The housing authority hasn't updated its name on utility bills since the 2010 merger of multiple entities because it would cost about $120,000, so those bills need to be monitored closely.

Similar issues surfaced last fall and Sedera met with Hill and the finance department about them. But Sedera was told the issues would be resolved. Last year, the agency was placed on a credit hold with multiple entities, such as the Las Vegas Valley Water District, Republic Services for waste and recycling services, SimplexGrinnell for fire inspections, and a landscaping company.

"This is a pattern that has been going on for a while. That's why I thought these were resolved issues," Sedera said.

Contact Yesenia Amaro at yamaro@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3843. Find her on Twitter: @YeseniaAmaro