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Politics & Government

Washington County Nonprofits Take a Wait-And-See Approach to Shutdown

If shutdown drags on, services will likely be cut, nonprofit organizations say.

Representatives from two Washington County nonprofit organizations say they’re providing services as usual for now, but if a Minnesota state government shutdown drags on long, they might have to cut back their services.

“We don’t have any plans to suspend or stop serving people,” said Ed Boeve, executive director of East Suburban Resources, a nonprofit organization that helps adults with disabilities get and keep employment. “We would revisit that decision if we get into a third week here, and I think that’s what a lot of people are doing.”

Boeve said it’s in part an issue of cash flow. Each month, the Washington County-based organization gets about $275,000 (about 70 percent) of its funding from the state, and during the last state government shutdown in 2005, payments came more sporadically than usual since the department that issues the checks was working with a skeleton staff.

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East Suburban Resources is due to get a state payment Wednesday, Boeve said.

Another financial consideration, Boeve said, is that the organization doesn’t yet know whether its funding will be cut in the 2011-12 budget since there is no agreement. In 2005, once a budget was agreed upon, it was made retroactive back to July 1.

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“Hopefully there are some negotiations that are going to go some direction, and if they’re going in the direction of significant cuts, we’ll respond to that,” Boeve said.

For now, the shutdown is having a minimal impact on the organization, Boeve said, although the approximately 12 adults who work at a Minnesota Department of Transportation maintenance facility or Running Aces Harness Track were out of work Friday, he said.

At Stillwater-based Community Thread, two programs—the Medical Reserve Corps and the Transportation Services—are being affected by the state government shutdown.

The rides program at Community Thread will continue through July for people who request it, but if the shutdown drags on, transportation will be impacted, said Valerie Jones, the organization's executive director.

Community Thread contracts for the program through Washington County Community Services and is reimbursed by the state. If the shutdown continues into August, the transportation program will probably not be operational, she said.

The Medical Reserve Corps will also be impacted because the state holds the database of available volunteers, Jones said. Community Thread has been working to create its own databases over the past few weeks, as the shutdown became more of a reality.

Washington County nonprofits’ wait-and-see approach is similar to other organizations throughout the state, said Frank Forsberg, senior vice president of community impact for the Greater Twin Cities United Way.

“If (the shutdown) lasts more than three or four weeks, I think it’s at that point that you’re going to start seeing nonprofits getting into the next phase of their contingency planning,” said Forsberg, whose organization has nearly 200 agency partners and helps fund more than 400 programs.

Forsberg said United Way officials work with partners on an ongoing basis to create multiple contingency plans and put cash-flow resources in places to bridge any unforeseen or significant losses of funding, state or otherwise.

With the writing on the wall, he said planning elevated a month ago when a shutdown seemed inevitable.

The United Way, which raised $88.5 million in 2010, altered its disbursement schedule to help its sponsored programs to continue running.

Typically, Forsberg said, United Way pays monthly installments to its partners. To help protect the programs during the shutdown, United Way advanced three months’ worth of allocations for agencies most impacted.

“We are hearing from a lot of our members that they are making a lot of tough decisions,” said Christine Durand, spokesperson for the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits. Among the kinds of nonprofit work not included in state funding during the shutdown: childcare, domestic-violence prevention and assistance, food assistance, arts and environment and weatherization.

MCN briefings to help nonprofit groups grapple with the effects of a shutdown began three weeks ago and will continue, Durand said. Among the topics: how to lay off and furlough workers.

Minnesota’s 3,750 nonprofits employ one of every nine workers in the state, according to the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, earning wages of $13.2 billion in 2009. Slightly more than half of those workers—about 153,000—are in the Twin Cities metro area.

Their work “touches every Minnesotan in some way, shape or form,” Durand said, but “they can’t run on air.”

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