CARBONDALE -More than a week after state lawmakers passed a debt-laden budget, social service agencies throughout the region remain in financial limbo.

The threatened 50 percent budget cuts could still hit some agency funding but administrators won't know until next week at the earliest just how - and by how much - their budgets will be hit.

At the Delta Center in Cairo, officials laid off 52 of their 129 employees earlier this month � 42 of those were full time posts. The Delta Center offers mental health, prevention and youth services to about 1,000 people annually. Officials expect that number to drop significantly.

"Everything that we planned on (to adjust for the 50 percent cuts) is still happening," said Jason Lindsey of the Delta Center. "We have no Teen Reach programs. Sixty kids attended those regularly. I don't know what they are doing now."

The state has informed social service agencies that notification of their funding levels will be made available sometime next week. That said, agency administrators are not sure if they'll be able to restore the jobs that were cut.

Such is the case at Southern Illinois Regional Social Services in Carbondale, which laid off 20 people earlier this month.

Karen Freitag of SIRSS said she's not sure what jobs could be restored there. "We just don't know yet," she said. "The governor and his deputies have to make some decisions and it's hard to predict what they are going to be."

The H Group in West Frankfort laid off 33 workers and forced 12 employees to take pay cuts or demotions. Executive Director John Markley said he's optimistic some of those positions will be restored and that he's notified some employees that they might have their jobs back.

"I think we are on track to call back seven or eight employees; they know who they are," he said. "We are waiting on the rest of the information but we are calling those people back because we are pretty sure that some of the monies related to those services are coming back."

At Fellowship House in Anna, CEO Mickey Finch said the first suggested cuts meant her agency's budget would shrink from $1.7 million to $475,000 this year. Fellowship House provides 24-hour, seven-day-a-week residential rehabilitation, detoxification and prevention services to state-verified drug addicts.

Finch, who laid off 15 people from a staff of 45, said the budget uncertainty is affecting her employees.

"It feels very precarious," she said. "It's hard on your employees because they don't know whether to leave and go find a stable position somewhere else or stay here and see what happens."

Finch added, "At this point we've been told we'll be getting more (than 50 percent funding) but we don't know how much that means. They have told us we are getting cut but we don't know how deep. If we get more money I will have to hire more people; we are really limping right now."

blackwell.thomas@thesouthern.com

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