Five years ago, the Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission – one of the largest anti-poverty agencies in the United States – was sitting on $15 million in unrestricted reserves.
By last year, that balance had fallen to $125,000. Hundreds of invoices were delinquent. The agency needed $5 million in emergency bank loans just to keep the lights on after burning through four finance officers.
Today, nobody can fully explain where the money went.
A forensic audit presented to the EOC’s board on Feb. 23 found “no evidence of abuse.” But it could not answer the basic question of what the agency’s reserves were spent on. The CEO who presided over the collapse — Emilia Reyes — is gone.
The board chair who oversaw her — Oliver Baines — has resigned, alongside one-third of the board that stepped down at the end of last year. And a 26-year veteran commissioner was not reappointed by the Fresno County Board of Supervisors last month.
The people who were supposed to find out what happened to EOC’s money are disappearing before the question is answered, leaving current and former board members questioning whether anyone will be held accountable for what went wrong.
Fresnoland reviewed years of EOC board and committee records and interviewed current and former board members, agency staff, and officials with direct knowledge of the agency’s finances.
“The Finance Committee definitely should have raised a red flag to the board,” said Baines, the former board chair who presided over the collapse of EOC’s finances. “It was an overall institutional failure.”
How did Fresno EOC use its COVID funds?
For 60 years, the Fresno County EOC has been a bulwark against some of the worst poverty in America. Over half of the county’s Black and Latino households live in poverty — roughly four times the national rate.
The $170 million agency runs 30 Head Start preschool centers designed to serve more than 2,000 children. Its food services arm feeds families across the county. Its transit system carries the elderly, the disabled, and rural residents who have no other way to get around. All told, its roughly 35 programs touch nearly every dimension of poverty in Fresno County — a miniature government for the people the regular government doesn’t reach.
What is clear is that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency was flooded with $170 million in record funding – and then EOC mismanaged the windfall. As revenues surged over the span of a few years, documents and interviews show, the county’s safety net for hundreds of thousands of vulnerable residents began to buckle.
In 2025, the Fresno EOC Board declined to renew CEO Emilia Reyes’ contract and brought back former CEO Brian Angus — who had retired — to fix the organization’s financial situation.
Angus found the agency’s cash reserve nearly wiped out and an administration department that had ballooned while the agency bled cash.
The Feb. 23 forensic audit confirmed what interim leaders discovered when they arrived: “Pockets of the organization didn’t understand or weren’t mindful of budgets,” auditors found, and “there was no budget consideration for administration purchases” across finance, executive, and administration divisions. Some employees told auditors they were unaware of what their budget was, or if there even was a budget.
In 2025, Angus cut more than 30 staff, brought back a former CFO to stabilize the situation, and negotiated emergency loans with local banks just to keep the nonprofit alive, he confirmed.
Those hail-mary maneuvers still weren’t enough. Late last year, the EOC closed its LGBTQ community center due to strained finances.
The long-awaited February forensic audit also painted a picture of an organization where overspending was rampant, budgets were ignored, and some employees told auditors they didn’t even know if a budget existed for their department.
The auditors concluded the agency ran into trouble once it started to spend down its reserves. But they left a more fundamental question unanswered: Where did the $15 million in reserves actually go?
A timeline of events compiled by Fresnoland raises tough questions about the EOC board itself. Starting in 2021, the EOC board voted multiple times to dismantle its own oversight structure – gutting committees and consolidating power during what would become the agency’s financial crisis. By the time the EOC’s reserves were gone and the board was giving the CEO the boot, these self-appointed watchdogs had few independent checks left.
The new leadership at EOC has been careful with information about the agency’s transition. A spokesperson with EOC would neither confirm nor deny Baine’s departure, arguing the board’s exodus and related changes to EOC “isn’t a story.”
“I’m no longer on the board,” Baines said over text message when reached by Fresnoland. “There has been lots of board turnover.”
Dismantling oversight as money disappears
Over the same three years that the EOC’s finances were deteriorating, the board dismantled its ability to see what was happening.
The Fresno EOC once had eight standing committees — Finance, Audit, Infrastructure, Pension, Human Resources, Program Planning and Evaluation, Bylaws, and the Executive Committee. Each was a set of eyes on a different part of the agency’s operations. Commissioners sat on these panels, reviewed budgets and contracts, and asked questions before matters reached the full board.
Many of these committees were eliminated because board leaders said cutting the red tape would increase oversight.
The dismantling began in early 2021, a year into Reyes’s tenure as CEO. In March of that year, the agency’s attorney, Kenneth Price, outlined the first wave in a memo to the EOC’s Bylaws Committee. Price flagged the key change explicitly: “Article X — Please note the consolidation of standing committees per our discussions.”
A slate of veteran board members reviewed that proposal: board chair Linda Hayes, future board chair Oliver Baines, who made the motion for approval, Jimi Rodgers, and Charles Garabedian, a longtime EOC watchdog who voted for the changes but would later call them a mistake.
In October 2021, the Bylaws Committee voted unanimously to consolidate the number of committees, merging Infrastructure into Finance and Pension into Human Resources. The motion was made by Baines, seconded by Catherine Robles.
The first deficit hit the following year.
Three years later, in an anonymous survey, one commissioner would assess the cost: “The consolidation of committees has decreased the involvement of commissioners in decision-making of programming and planning.”
The first cracks
Just as the guardrails came off, the agency’s internal operations were deteriorating in ways that wouldn’t become visible for years.
In 2021, the agency’s finance director, a 19-year veteran named Rebecca Heinricy, was let go. Heinricy could not be reached for comment. Years later, a former CFO brought back to clean up the wreckage would put it plainly to the board:
“The Finance Office of Fresno EOC has not had an experienced or qualified financial head since Rebecca Heinricy was let go. I guarantee that we would not be in the present fiscal mess if Rebecca was still here,” the board was told in May 2025 by ex-CFO Salam Nalia.
The loss of Heinricy set off a chain of turnover that hollowed out the agency’s financial controls. The agency cycled through multiple finance officers under Reyes. Charles Garabedian, the 26-year board veteran and former Finance Committee chair, said the agency lost its deep bench of expertise.
“We had, at one time, so many CPAs,” Garabedian told Fresnoland. “At one point, we were down to one left in the organization.”
The damage from that turnover showed up first in the audits. The fiscal year 2021 audit wasn’t presented to the board until April 2023 — more than 15 months after the books closed. The FY 2022 audit didn’t arrive until December 2023. The board was governing an agency whose financial picture was, at best, a year old.
The delays were so severe the auditors warned in 2023 the delinquency “could lead to withholding payments, noncompliance with grant guidelines,” and other legal risks.
The delays were also obscuring deep financial trouble. In 2022, agency leaders originally budgeted a modest surplus of $181,000. By the time the late audit was completed, the agency posted a $3.18 million operating loss — a variance of $3.36 million. The bleeding had started, but nobody was raising a red flag inside EOC.
While the deficits were growing, the board was moving in the opposite direction — cutting oversight further.
EOC dismantled more oversight as deficits increased
On Nov. 6, 2023, the EOC’s attorney presented a new set of revisions to the agency oversight structure. The Finance, Program Planning and Evaluation, and HR/Pension committees would all be eliminated as independent bodies. All would be merged into a single nine-member Executive Committee. Only the Audit and Bylaws committee would remain independent. The vote was unanimous, with Baines and board chair Linda Hayes making the motion.
The combination of late financial reports and gutted oversight proved disastrous. In 2024 – the first full year under that structure, the agency posted one of the worst deficits in its 60-year history.
Looking back on the changes, Baines said the board’s heart was in the right place.
“While it wasn’t a great decision, it wasn’t like they [the board] made it because they were trying to hurt the agency.”
The decision to eliminate the committees was an attempt, Baines said, to increase the participation of board members. By making the Executive Committee more high-stakes, Baines had originally hoped that the board would be more engaged and oversight would improve.
“We gave it a shot,” Baines said. “It wasn’t as effective as you’d want.”
But results from a 2024 board survey shows the extent in which the changes kept commissioners out of the loop.
“I’ve been on the board about six months and am not sure which committees we have except for executive committee. Clarity would be appreciated here!” they wrote in 2024, the worst year of the deficits.
When asked who advocated for the consolidation, Baines — who was part of the Bylaws Committee that proposed it — denied responsibility.
“That was not my decision,” Baines said. “That decision was made by the former CEO. I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“For anyone to say that that was my fault is pretty laughable,” he added. “People who don’t like me are cherry-picking.”
Emilia Reyes, the EOC’s chief executive officer from 2020 to 2024, during the deficit years, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Following the money
By early 2025, when the board began picking up the pieces, the scale of the damage had reached into many parts of EOC’s operations. In October 2024 alone, roughly 400 invoices went unpaid – vendors, contractors, and service providers all waiting on money from an agency that was supposed to be a lifeline for the poor. Roughly $15 million in operational reserves were consumed by deficits in the span of a few years.
Out of the $4.46 million deficit in 2024, administration was the single largest driver at $2.15 million, followed by Food Services at $1.51 million, Transit at $540,000, and the Local Conservation Corps at $440,000.
Budget documents and financial reports show the broad outlines of what drove those losses. But the specifics – who authorized the spending, what it paid for, and where the money ultimately went – remain largely unknown.
Reyes became CEO in 2020 after Angus’ tenure ended. She inherited an agency with experienced staff and deep institutional knowledge. As veteran employees left and expertise drained away, the agency’s costs climbed – and spending under Reyes, the board would later discover, ballooned.
“A lot of the people kind of left, but we did have individuals that were very talented ready to step up to the plate,” said Charles Garabedian, an EOC board member for 26 years.
“And somehow they were driven out. I think she was more focused on loyalty than anything else.”
Reyes “was spending on lavish things, from furniture to bonuses,” Garabedian added. “She was becoming top-heavy.”
The available records bear that out – up to a point.
A year-end financial report in 2024 disclosed that “Other Costs” had reached 150% of budget — $706,678 spent against $470,466 budgeted — attributed in part to “community relations costs” that were never itemized.
What was specified: an all-staff event that posted a $66,000 bill, and staff service awards to the tune of about $40,000.
Then there were the credit cards.
Within a year of Reyes’ departure, credit card spending dropped by $150,000 a month – approximately 75%, according to the EOC audit.
What happened when people asked questions?
After more than a year of investigation, few concrete details have emerged about why exactly the EOC changed its oversight structure and where its depleted reserves went.
In February 2025, the board authorized a forensic audit to investigate potential “irregularities related to contracting, purchasing, procurement, standard operating procedures, policies, regulations, and other financial activities.” The firm selected, Wipfli LLP, was awarded the contract partly because it had an approximately $40,000 credit with the EOC from a prior project it had only half completed.
The final audit, presented to the board on Feb. 23, framed the fiscal mess as case-closed. The auditors found that EOC executives “bypassed” built-in budget controls using credit cards, which ran as high as $200,000 a month.
But it did not show what was bought with those purchases, nor how the debt was paid off.
The agency has yet to chart a complete map of the financial mess, according to Baines.
He also said that even Angus — who had run the agency for a decade before Reyes, came out of retirement to clean up the mess, and spent six months going through the books — could not piece together the full picture. In an interview, Baines described his final conversation with Angus before the interim CEO left.
“I said, hey, man — what really happened here, now that you’ve had a chance to just kind of pull back all the operations?” Baines recalled. “You’ve been here six months. You used to run this agency. You know it better than anybody.”
Angus’s answer, as Baines recounted it, was that administrators still couldn’t make sense of the mess.
Reyes did not return repeated phone calls over several weeks of reporting.
Still unaddressed were concerns raised in an anonymous board survey in fall 2024. One commissioner wrote of “the perceived financial conflicts of interest that arise when awarding contracts that are not brought to the full board.” None of those concerns were taken up by the audit.
Now, many of the people with the most knowledge of how the EOC worked — and didn’t work — during the bad years are gone. At the January meeting, Baines stepped down. Seven other commissioners — Kathleen Arambula, Lauren Nikkel, Alena Pacheco, Daniel Martinez, Dr. Mitchell, Jalyssa Jenkins, and Manuel Romero — left last year.
Garabedian, the 26-year veteran and former Finance Committee chair, was not reappointed by the Board of Supervisors in February.
“You get 24 new board members, they have no idea what to do,” Garabedian said. “They have no history of the organization. They don’t know this guy from that guy, or anything like that.”
Baines, now off the board, said that many of the decisions made during Reyes’s tenure have since been reversed. The committees started meeting again last year. The administrative staff has been cut. A new CEO and a new financial team are in place. The agency is trying to get back on its feet.
“We gave her every opportunity to correct it, and when she couldn’t correct it, we didn’t extend her contract,” Baines said about Reyes. “We have some good safeguards in place. Before that, there were several points where I think it failed.”
But Garabedian, who spent years pressing for answers that never came, said the safeguards came too late — and that many questions still haven’t been answered.
“No one was really watching the door to money going out,” Garabedian said. “And here we are — an anti-poverty program.”
