The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

Carrie Ward knew that SOAR (Sisters Organization for Activities and Recreation) had money problems when she took the job as its new executive director. That has been confirmed in the brief month she has been on board.

“What we are looking at right now is an issue of cash flow over the next couple of months between now and mid-November when our tax revenues start coming in,” she said in an interview last week. “We don’t have enough money to bridge that gap to cover all of our expenses.

“This is not altogether untypical for small local governments…Larger ones have budgets with reserves (for this purpose). SOAR has a small budget and we don’t have any reserves built up today.”

How big is the problem? “We estimate that we’ll probably need a maximum of $60,000, and probably closer to $40,000. That will vary according to how our non-tax revenues come in.”

Ward explained that to bridge the gap SOAR has taken out a loan of up to $60,000 from the Bank of the Cascades. She said this is the first year SOAR has had to do this. The “biggest contributing factor” was the loss of a federal Community Learning Center grant that has brought in more than $60,000 a year.

Former SOAR director Tom Coffield, Ward’s predecessor, confirmed that the federal grant expired at the close of the 2004-05 fiscal year. He also confirmed that SOAR has never had to take out a summer bridge loan before.

“This is the same thing we tried to explain to the public when we went for the local option. We have lost grant funds and we cannot continue to offer the services that SOAR has been offering without some more community help,” Coffield said. “Programs like our teen center that we don’t charge middle school and high school kids to come to, we have to have staff people on duty there and we pay them, so we lose money every day that we operate that…

“To be honest it was kind of frustrating from my point of view trying to get this point across to the community that these programs are important but we don’t have the money to operate them.”

The former director was referring to a measure on the May 17 ballot that would have imposed a five-year tax levy of 35 cents per $1,000 of property value, raising an estimated $262,000 per year. Coffield said SOAR was “lucky” to have the Community Learning Center grant for six years; such grants normally last only three years but he reapplied and was given a second round of funding.

But now that that and some other funding is gone, “what SOAR really needs if we can’t get the local option…are some long-term sponsors willing to say I’m going to give you $500 or $1,000 a year…on an ongoing basis.”

Ward explained that SOAR receives only 27 percent of its roughly $660,000 annual budget from property tax revenue through an existing operating levy of 22 cents per thousand.

Ward said the organization is making “as many cost-cutting efforts as we can. We’ll be cutting back on materials and supplies where we can. This will probably show up as not having as many art supplies in some of our children’s programs. We are also going to try to defer as many major expenses as we can. For instance, our large bus needs repair work but we’re just going to have to let that sit instead of getting it fixed with a big bill.”

SOAR is also encouraging people to register early for the fall and winter sports programs, offering a small discount incentive. And “our foundation is working diligently to ramp up and do some fundraising projects this fall and winter.”

Ward said she is going to work on refining cash flow projections for this fiscal year, “trying to tighten those up so we can maximize our revenue-generating abilities and minimize our expenses where possible.” After that, with the help of SOAR treasurer and board member Ben Ehrenstrom, she will turn to a five-year projection “so we can get a longer-term view.

“But no matter how we move the numbers around it’s still a small budget, it’s a pretty shoestring budget. We really do need to work with the community to figure out how to get the organization some stable funding.”

In terms of current options, Ward said: “We want to try really hard to not cut programs, especially the youth programs.”