After overcoming the hardship of almost being shut down in fall 2010, members of the Sexual Assault Counseling and Information Service face having their budget cut in half.

SACIS is an independent non-profit agency that is part of the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault, made up of 33 sexual assault centers.

Bonnie Buckley, the executive director of SACIS, said the budget for ICASA this year was about $4.2 million and Gov. Pat Quinn is proposing to cut its budget for next year to $2.1 million.

“The governor is proposing that we get a 50 percent cut next year and that will mean that crisis centers have gotten a 64 percent cut in the last three years,” Buckley said.

“I have been a part of SACIS for 32 years and never, ever, have we ever been in this kind of financial situation and I know it is all related to the state and federal economy, but this past year has been the worst we have faced.”

Buckley said the budget situation has become more difficult for them each year.

“The stress of not knowing whether we will be able to stay open has been a huge problem and last summer it would be the first thing I would think of in the morning and the last thing I would think about at night,” Buckley said. “We have staff who rely on funding and clients who rely on our services, so if we had to close they would have no place to go to get services.”

Buckley said she used money from her husband’s life insurance policy to pay SACIS employees.

“My husband died last August, and September was the worst month because we just didn’t have money to pay the staff,” Buckley said. “We experience ongoing threats of budget cuts all of the time and it is very difficult to work with.”

Buckley loaned the agency $30,000 to meet payroll and pay the bills.

“Otherwise we would have had to close,” Buckley said.

Buckley said they have had to cut three positions, leaving them with 11 employees, and reduce full-time staff members to part-time hours.

“The time that we have to spend writing the governor and legislators and meeting with people to try and fight the budget has been difficult, because it is taking a lot of extra time when that time could be used to make life better for survivors,” Buckley said.

She said SACIS used to be able to host many programs on campus in the past, but they have not had the opportunity to do nearly as much this year.

“One thing that has happened to us and all kinds of other agencies and organizations throughout the state is that when the state can’t pay its bills, we have to borrow money from banks in order to pay our bills,” Buckley said. “There are so many agencies that are hurting because of these cuts and it affects all levels of education along with those who provide human services.”

Buckley said they can fight the 50 percent budget cut and restore their funding by proposing to take $2.1 million from the Sexually Violent Persons Program budget and transfer it to ICASA.

“The Sexually Violent Persons Program is for sex offenders who are deemed too sexually violent to be let out of prison once their prison sentence is over,” Buckley said. “It is a residential program so we understand that it will cost more per person but the average cost per victim in our coalition is $235 and the average cost per offender in the Sexually Violent Persons Program is $57,773.”

Buckley said the SVPP’s current budget is about $25.4 million and the governor is proposing to increase its budget to $27.1 million.

“We are not saying that we want the program to end because it is an important program and it needs to be kept going, but we don’t think that all that money should be spent on the offenders while the victims, who did not cause the crime, are getting cut,” Buckley said. “They are essentially rewarding the offenders and punishing the victims.”

Buckley said the 33 rape crisis centers serve more than 18,000 formal clients. This does not include people who call the crisis hotline and others who receive counseling but prefer not to be formal clients.

She said SACIS had 618 clients, 294 of whom are formal clients and the rest are counseled but choose not to go through the intake process.

“There are 440 people who are a part of the Sexually Violent Persons Program and over the course of ten years, only 40 people have been released from the program,” Buckley said.

Buckley said in October, ICASA spent the month measuring its service’s effectiveness with evaluations by clients and they received a positive outcome.

According to a study done by the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Rockford, Ill., 95 percent of the ICASA clients said they would use the center again and 75 percent reported improvement in coping and behavior.

“One aspect the governor talks about that the state of Illinois should be committed to in doing budgeting is to do outcome evaluations so then one of the questions is that if we have done our surveys and our outcomes have been very good, then why are we getting cut?” Buckley said. “We do not know if the Sexually Violent Persons Program has ever been evaluated and so the other question is, what have they done to warrant an increase in funding?”

The SACIS office is located on campus in the basement of Lawson Hall.

“We assist people in healing from being sexually victimized so it can make a huge impact on people’s lives, and sometimes we are the first people who believe them,” Buckley said. “We are going to do whatever we can to stay afloat and keep helping others.”

Rachel Rodgers can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].