Urban League

The News-Gazette had two interesting articles yesterday about the Urban Legue of Champaign County.  The first:

When Parsons, an Urbana native, moved back from Chicago to take over the Urban League in 1994, he inherited six programs, 12 employees and a $1.2 million budget.

Ten years later, the agency had 25 programs, 60 workers and a $5 million budget, a growth rate unmatched in the National Urban League system. It ranked in the top fifth of 104 Urban League chapters, larger than either Cincinnati or Detroit.

That rapid growth, to some extent, became its Achilles' heel. Even as the financial staff oversaw more programs with complex regulations, the demands on Parsons' time grew. He was out of the office up to 80 percent of the time, asked to lead the charge on school reform, police-community relations and other issues.

Late last year, state officials yanked two major grants from the Urban League – the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and the Illinois Home Weatherization Assistance Program – questioning the agency's financial oversight. The$3 million in grants represented 60 percent of its budget.

Now, coming off three years of deficits and the layoff of nearly half its staff, the Urban League has regrouped. It's leaner – with 30 employees, 16 programs and a $2 million balanced budget – and a lot more cautious. It's launching new initiatives, with a sharper focus.

The second:

The Urban League is still fighting with the state over hundreds of thousands of dollars of claims from the LIHEAP and weatherization programs.

The programs help qualified households pay utility bills and cut energy costs by making homes more energy-efficient. Locally, they serve more than 6,000 people annually.

The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services said last December that the Urban League had failed to make $249,000 in energy assistance payments to Ameren on behalf of program customers in fiscal 2006 and that the state paid $200,000 for home weatherization work that wasn't completed.

Urban League Board President Sandra Jones said the work was completed. The problem, she said, was a matter of timing. The agency submitted bills at the end of the fiscal year, June 30, 2006 – before the work was finished.

"We absolutely had every intention of doing the work," she said, but added, "We did make a mistake, there's no question about it."

Discuss.