After saying that it would not apply for a federal grant to help fund the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency says that it did, in fact, seek federal funding for the effort to digitize every document the Great Emancipator wrote or read.
“There was some internal miscommunication about that, which led me to tell you the application would not be submitted,” IHPA spokesman Chris Wills wrote in an email yesterday afternoon to Illinois Times. “My apologies.”
Wills’ email came the day of a deadline to apply for the grant and after the paper posted a story that included a September memo from Daniel Stowell, the project’s director, who wrote that he had been ordered to not apply for grants. In the memo addressed to members of a project advisory board, Stowell wrote that Amy Martin, IHPA director, had frozen the project’s accounts and that the project that began in the 1980s faced a de facto shutdown as well as an investigation by the office of the executive inspector general.
Wills on Wednesday had told Illinois Times that the agency would not apply for a grant from the National Historical Records and Publications Commission, an arm of the National Archives that last year provided a grant of nearly $100,000 that was to be spent this fiscal year. As a grant condition, the state was required to provide matching money, but the governor’s office has said matching funds aren’t available due to the state’s failure to pass a budget.
The state has requested $139,574, Wills wrote in an email. The fate of the grant for nearly $97,000 that has already been awarded could have a bearing on whether the state’s pending application is successful.
Keith Donohue, communications director for the National Historical Records and Publications Commission, said that he cannot comment on specific grants or applications, but the commission looks at past performance when agencies that have received grants in the past ask for more money. That includes how agencies have used matching funds, he said.
“If you have received a grant, you have to be successful in order to receive a subsequent grant,” Donohue said.
It’s not clear where matching funds will come from for the grant that has already been awarded or for the grant that was recently applied for. The IHPA did not respond to an emailed query asking whether a source for matching funds for both grants has been identified.
In a story posted Thursday, Illinois Times reported that Stowell’s memo authored in September was not included in the agency’s original response to a records request. Wills said that the IHPA did include the memo in a response sent to a file transfer website. When the newspaper tried opening the file, a dialogue box appeared stating that the paper would have to purchase online software to access the material. The paper then asked for and received records on a compact disc, but several files on that disc could not be opened. Wills ultimately sent the newspaper Word files of the documents on the CD that could not be opened. The Stowell memo was not in those materials. The newspaper obtained the memo after pointing out that an attachment mentioned in an email that IHPA disclosed had not been provided. The newspaper asked Wills to provide the attachment, which proved to be the memo. Wills provided the memo on Thursday.
Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2015.
