GAC considers changes
needed to cut ’09 budget
By G. Jeffrey MacDonald, The Layman, March 25, 2009
LOUISVILLE – When members of the General Assembly Council convene their spring meeting on Wednesday, they’ll have an extra tool in their toolbox when they move to close a budget deficit of nearly $10 million.
In a kickoff meeting Tuesday, the GAC’s executive committee got a glimmer of hope from Joey Bailey, chief finance officer for the council. He said his team had identified almost $6 million in unspent funds from fiscal year 2008. That means the council will likely need to identify only about $4 million in spending cuts when it meets this week.
Even so, committee members who gathered here at the Brown Hotel seemed to harbor no delusions that this week would be easy. Staff layoffs are all but certain to result from a rare series of three closed-door sessions scheduled for this week.
The committee launched its meeting with a sobering sign of the times. Minutes after an opening prayer, members approved a proposal to postpone until 2010 a joint meeting, now scheduled for September, between the GAC and the Middle Governing Body. The GAC will vote on the proposal later this week.
In light of budget constraints, said Executive Committee chair Carol Adcock, postponing the meeting “just seemed to be the wisest move to make.”
Presenters laid the bulk of the denomination’s financial woes at the feet of the financial crisis that has engulfed every sector of the U.S. economy. GAC Executive Director Linda Valentine introduced budget discussions by noting that the S&P 500 Index has dropped 50 percent from its high 18 months ago, and people everywhere are hurting.
“Congregations and presbyteries have felt the effect of this and are projecting lower revenues,” Valentine said. “We hear 10 percent, 15 percent, 35 percent” from one setting to the next.
According to the latest figures presented Tuesday, GAC revenue from local sources has taken a hard hit recently. Directed mission support, which comes from congregations and presbyteries, is on track to come in 8.4 percent lower than 2008 and almost 20 percent under budget. Missionary support, collected in specific appeals, is en route this year to fall 14.3 percent below last year’s totals and 33 percent below the $440,000 budgeted for 2009. In total, shared mission support is projected to deliver just $11 million – that’s $570,000 less than 2008 and $1.7 million under budget.
Neither staffers nor committee members discussed whether denominational positions on hot-button issues might account for some of the dwindling revenue stream.
In other business, the committee endorsed a proposal to limit access to General Assembly Council deliberations. If approved by the full council later this week, the measure would let the council bar its 14 non-voting members from closed session discussions. Since 2006, non-voting members have had access to such meetings. But supporters of the proposal said they’d received advice to codify a prerogative to close the door on so-called “corresponding members,” such as the Advocacy Committee for Women’s Concerns (ACWC), just in case their presence in particular discussions would ever present a conflict of interest.
The action met with some dissent.
“I think the message goes out rather clearly that you are starting to exclude people who are otherwise included,” said Bill Gray, co-chair of the ACWC. “You send a message that you don’t care enough to continue to include the corresponding members from the advocacy committees.”