The State Historical Society submitted a proposal cutting $259,300 from the state tax-supported section of its 2004-05 budget, in response to a demand from Gov. Jim Doyle.
The society made reductions by eliminating four positions, partly because of a merger between the Division of Historic Preservation and the Division of Public History.
In addition, the director of the public-history division, Michael Stevens, will switch from his current position to manage the new division to make the cuts possible.
“What we’re doing is creating a vacancy,” acting director of the State Historical Society Robert Thomasgard said. “We are taking three divisions and combining them into two.”
The deleted positions include financial-management supervisor, program assistant and underwater-archeologist manager, who is in charge of investigated shipwrecks and submerged resources. Thomasgard said three of the eliminated positions were vacant at the time of the cut. The other two are administrative services, meaning there will be little impact on students, he said.
“What we’ve tried to do is protect as much (of the society’s resources) as we can,” Thomasgard said. “We’ve cut more behind-the-scenes type operations, and the cuts approved last Friday don’t have appreciable affects on the public-access parts of the society.”
Volunteers at the State Historical Society work a total of 250,000 hours annually, which is the equivalent of the workloads of 120 state-employed positions. “Roughly, the number of volunteer hours translated into permanent employees is very close to outnumbering the number of permanent employees we have,” Thomasgard said. “Half of the hours the society benefits from are worked by volunteers, and the other half by permanent employees.”
Thomasgard said the society is considering the possibility of employing volunteers from the Friends of the Historical Society to fill the growing volunteer needs.
“We’re keeping our hours the same as in the past, which is increasingly difficult to do,” he said. “We’re looking for volunteers right now, and also work-study students and limited-term student employees to fill the void.”
The Black Historical Society will also be affected by budget cuts, due to the support it draws from the State Historical Society.
“Legislation puts money in our budgets to provide operating assistance to [the Black Historical Society],” Thomasgard said.
The State Historical Society reduced funding to the Black Historical Society by $3,600 for both 2003-04 and 2004-05 budgets, leaving the Black Historical Society with $82,800 in fiscal support.
University of Wisconsin professor of journalism James P. Danky, who is also a newspaper and periodicals librarian at the campus Historical Society, said reductions were made in response to yet more budget trimmings.
“These cuts are certainly unwelcome, but they’re nothing at all like the cuts in the summer of 2001,” he said. Danky said the cuts approved Friday are less worrying than those of June 2001, particularly because they do not involve the library and archives. “Those are the two parts of the Historical Society that most students are familiar with, and any changes to those would definitely affect them,” he said.
Danky’s position survived the first round of budget cuts at the society in the summer of 2001, which trimmed the staff in his department down from three employees to one.
“Those first cuts really did affect the library and archives, and if there are more cuts, there is more potential for them to directly affect students,” he said. “The fact that we have unfilled positions means that less work occurs, and students will feel that.”
