Own worst enemy
NCI provides service to the community, struggles with self-inflicted fiscal woes

Tatum Cummings lies passed out at the McKinley County Courthouse Square on January 3. Because Cummings was unresponsive and extremely intoxicated she was taken to the Gallup Indian Medical Center to have her stomach pumped. — © 2009 Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Phil Stake
Staff writer

GALLUP — As the city’s only detoxification facility runs out of money, long-time residents and law-enforcement officials are reminded of its impact. They remember Gallup 20 years ago, when this New Mexico hamlet land-locked by reservations earned the moniker “Drunk Town, USA.”

“When I first moved here ... 25 years ago ... it was bad,” local business owner James Rich said Thursday. “I would walk over people. Some people just wouldn’t go out. If we didn’t have services like (NCI’s), I would be afraid that we would be left with the same thing.”

The financial debacle faced by Na’Nizhoozhi Center, Inc., better known as NCI, has not changed since the Independent March 21 story, that the non-profit facility will be forced to close in May without additional funding. However, a look at NCI’s accounting reveals vulnerabilities that may have led to its current fiscal predicament.

NCI has shown a “material weakness,” also called a “significant deficiency,” in its financial reporting every year since 1996, according to Albuquerque-based Moss Adams LLP, an accounting firm that has been auditing NCI’s budget since 1996.

“A material weakness is a significant deficiency ... that results in more than a remote likelihood that material noncompliance ... will not be prevented or detected by the entity’s internal control,” reads a March 17 letter from Moss Adams LLP to NCI’s board of directors.

Other significant deficiencies listed in NCI’s 2008 audited budget include “cash reconciliation,” “balance sheet account reconciliation” and “cash management.”

These vulnerabilities allowed questionable collections by NCI’s former clinical director, the late Dr. Robert Keenan, according to a memo sent by Detox Supervisor Kristina D. Gordon to NCI’s board of directors on April 15, 2008. Gordon requested that a client staying at NCI, Mervyn Tilden, who had volunteered to help with the facility’s computer lab, be compensated for his services “through the monies that are being paid to Dr. Keenan by the shelter clients for their stay here.”

The memo says that Keenan collected rent from NCI clients. Interim Executive Director Jay Azua confirmed Friday that the services provided by NCI are free.

Ironically, Tilden is one of a dozen current and former clients who received a money settlement after suing NCI. Through the years, lawsuits against NCI, which former Executive Director Raymond Daw dubbed a “treatment facility/jail” during a deposition, have ranged from federal civil rights violations and false imprisonment to assault, battery, negligence and wrongful death.

Ramah-based attorney William Stripp said he has represented clients suing NCI between eight and 10 times since the facility opened in 1992.

“All the cases have settled,” Stripp said.

In legal terms, “settled” means NCI and its co-defendents paid money to the client rather than be tried before a jury.

Settling also prevents the possibly greater payout of a long and drawn-out legal battle. Stripp is quick to point out that settlements do not imply an admission of guilt nor do they require any behavior change on the part of NCI; and the amount of the settlement is usually obscured by a confidentiality agreement, meaning only NCI and the client know how much money is paid out. However, Stripp said, the settlements averaged about $4,000 for each day the client was held at NCI, which has ranged from three days to two weeks. That means that a client who stayed at NCI two weeks drained about $56,000 from the facility, which now is nearing insolvency and approaching broke.

The allegations of employee misconduct — and the volume of resulting lawsuits — led Lexington Insurance Group to cancel the facility’s coverage in 2003. Without liability insurance, NCI is exposed to financial ruin, which prompted NCI to request Gallup Police and McKinley County Sheriff’s Deputies to stand guard between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. March 17 and 18 of 2003.

“Police support minimized liability,” former Mayor Bob Rosebrough told the Independent March 19, 2003.

NCI has since negotiated split liability coverage from Gallup-based Bubany Insurance and Clay Fultz Insurance, the premiums of which are unknown.

The Independent has received similar employee-misconduct reports, some as recent as February.

In a letter to the Independent titled “The Horrors of NCI,” Lupton resident Christina Ray describes a practice in which clerks — responsible for the intake of intoxicated people who have been admitted for protective custody — rob the clients of their personal belongings.

“Their belongings are supposed to be tagged and put in storage for them,” Ray wrote. “The workers at NCI think that these people are too drunk to remember what they came in with.”

If a client ready for discharge raises a row with the employees, “the attendants would punish him by keeping him there several more days,” Shirl Lee Roper-Hardman, an employee with New Mexico Department of Health, wrote in a letter.

While these complaints are echoed by many former and current clients of NCI, the overwhelming majority of Gallup residents interviewed acknowledge the positive impact of NCI.

Last year alone, NCI temporarily housed about 17,000 intoxicated and transient people, according to statistics compiled by Gallup Police Department. Between Jan. 1 and March 15 of this year, intoxicated-person calls to Metro Dispatch totaled 2,698, according to dispatch records.

That’s nearly 3,000 publicly intoxicated people who may have saturated the plazas and parks and streets of Gallup without somewhere to go — and that somewhere has been NCI for 17 years.

Gallup Police Deputy Chief John Allen said the number of publicly intoxicated people was double its current number when he started patrol in 1993.

“Because of the programs NCI offers, we’ve seen a decrease of about half,” Allen said Thursday. “I can remember being on patrol when the panel driver picked up 200 people in one night. He was like: ‘Man, I don’t know if I can pick up any more!’”

Prior to NCI’s incorporation in September 1992, police warehoused intoxicated people in drunk tanks — jail cells — which filled to capacity every night. Every morning motorists witnessed the discharged men and women marching single file down Boardman Drive — in packs of 30 to 50 — according to Gallup Police Detective Sgt. Matt Wright, who remembers watching the gross tableau on his way to school.

“It keeps the intoxicated people from walking around and trying to find places to stay and breaking into places so they have somewhere to stay,” former Gallup Police Officer and current Director of Gallup McKinley Adult Detention Center Donna Goodrich said Thursday. “However many people NCI takes in at night, you’d have all those people out there in the community.”

Reporter Phil Stake can be reached at philip.stake@gmail.com, or by calling (505) 863-6811 x223.