A one-time 25% cut in federal funding to NPR Illinois will create one more challenge for the public radio station at University of Illinois Springfield.
"Combined with the other cuts, it doesn't help," General Manager Randy Eccles said. "We will get through it."
The nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives money from Congress to help support more than 1,500 locally owned public radio and television stations across the United States, confirmed the $50,015 cut to Illinois Times.
The reduction in CPB funding for WUIS (91.9 FM), which does business as NPR Illinois and operates with an annual $1.7 million budget, means the station's 2024 grant will be $151,494, CPB spokesperson Tracey Briggs said in an email.
"Public media stations must meet a variety of legal, managerial, staffing and operational criteria to receive annual Community Service Grant funding," Briggs said. "WUIS-FM was late filing its annual financial report, so its 2024 Community Service Grant has been reduced."
An unspecified illness that put a WUIS employee tasked with filing financial reports out of commission resulted in the station missing a February 2023 filing deadline by seven months, Eccles said.
Since then, the station has worked with UIS, which holds the station's license, to "put multiple pieces in place to make sure this doesn't happen again," he said. "This is a one-time event. ... As a small operation, we're one deep in most positions."
The news of the CPB grant funding reduction comes as the station tries to offset a five-year wind-down period of direct cash support from UIS for the 49-year-old station.
Direct funding from UIS peaked at $500,000 in 2015, and remained at that level for a few years after NPR Illinois' merger with Illinois Issues magazine.
Funding from UIS amounted to about $351,000 in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2023, according to the nonprofit station's audited financial statements.
UIS funding for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2024, will total about $220,000. And during the next fiscal year – the end of the five-year ramp-down – UIS funding is expected to total about $150,000, Eccles said.
The Springfield campus of University of Illinois announced in 2021 the eventual end of direct funding for the station, with then-Interim Chancellor Karen Whitney in charge, as part of a multi-year plan to address a multimillion-dollar structural deficit that stood at almost $8.8 million in fiscal 2023.
A 2021 memo from Whitney and an interim vice chancellor said: "UIS has had mixed financial performance over the last seven years, resulting in two surpluses and five deficits. ... UIS leadership is committed to addressing the reasons for these unacceptable financial results and is developing a five-year financial plan to return the campus to financial stability."
Components of the plan included growing enrollment. At the time, UIS had seen an undergraduate enrollment drop of 9.6% and a graduate enrollment drop of 39.5% between 2015 and 2020.
Other components of the financial stability plan, according to the memo, included "expense control," merging academic departments and launching a new College of Health, Science and Technology "while realigning the remaining colleges to preserve a four-year structure."
UIS reported in October 2023 that enrollment had increased for the second year in a row. After the first 10 days of classes, a total of 4,661 students were enrolled in the fall 2023 semester, an increase of 11% from the 4,198 students enrolled in fall 2022.
The campus has a new chancellor, Janet Gooch, but UIS spokesperson Blake Wood said campus leadership "does not intend" to change course on funding for the radio station.
"The decision to ramp down funding for NPR Illinois was in alignment with UIS' strategic priorities to focus our limited fiscal resources on our core academic mission," Wood said.
UIS does provide in-kind support to the station in the form of rent-free space and utilities.
The funding reduction has taken place as the number of NPR Illinois employees dropped through attrition, Eccles said.
The station had as many as 16 full-time employees – five of them news reporters – in 2017. There are now nine full-time employees, with two of them full-time reporters, as well as one part-time reporter, Eccles said.
NPR Illinois is trying to increase individual contributions and membership income to expand beyond the 10% of listeners who financially support the station, he said. That income is the largest single source of funding and totaled $538,693 in fiscal 2023 – an increase of about $39,000, or 7.8%, compared with the previous year.
The station saw business and industry contributions rise from $53,173 in fiscal 2022 to $88,546 in fiscal 2023, an increase of 66.5%. "We think that can continue to grow," Eccles said.
The station plans to hire another news reporter in the coming months, he said, adding that station listeners benefit from the state government news provided by Statehouse reporters Alex Degman and Mawa Iqbal. Degman and Iqbal are managed by Chicago-based NPR station WBEZ and are funded by payments from public radio stations across Illinois, including NPR Illinois, Eccles said.
NPR Illinois' financial situation isn't jeopardizing its ability to give listeners access to national NPR reporting, he said. Fees for that national programming are paid to several organizations and represent 20% of the station's operating expenses, he said.
Eccles, who grew up in Chicago's south suburbs and has worked at NPR Illinois for 15 years, said he is looking into potential philanthropic support and other alternatives to preserve and possibly increase what NPR Illinois offers.
But NPR Illinois continues to lose ground financially amid the funding reductions from UIS, Eccles said. The situation creates a quandary when local news outlets such as The State Journal-Register have undergone massive downsizing in recent years, he said.
"More and more, people are asking public media to fill that gap," he said.
Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer at Illinois Times. He can be reached at 217-679-7810, [email protected] or twitter.com/DeanOlsenIT.
