With finances uncertain, a financer of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project is urging the state to fund the project that aims to digitize every document that Lincoln either wrote or read during his lifetime.
“We consider this project one of the most important historical efforts by the State of Illinois,” wrote the Abraham Lincoln Association’s board of directors in a resolution approved last week that urges the state to keep the project alive.
The association has provided financial support for the project since the 1980s. Oct. 8 could prove a critical day, as it is the project’s deadline to apply for a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, a division of the National Archives that has helped fund the project in the past.
The commission last year gave the project a grant of nearly $100,000 for this fiscal year, but that money is languishing because the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency won’t sign a contract with the University of Illinois Springfield, which provides employees for the project, that includes provisions for state matching funds that are required by the federal grant. Also in jeopardy due to uncertainty over state matching funds is $400,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities the project planned to use over the next three years.
The state last year provided $243,000 in funding for the project and was due to increase that amount to nearly $300,000 under terms of the contract with UIS that IHPA won’t sign. The governor’s office blames the lack of a state budget. During a recent meeting of an advisory board for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, where the project is headquartered, Daniel Stowell, project director, said that he has been ordered not to apply for the federal grant that has applications due Oct. 8. Chris Wills, IHPA spokesman, did not respond to an emailed inquiry asking whether the agency would apply for the grant.
Beyond refusing to fund the project from its own coffers, the IHPA last month notified the University of Illinois Foundation and the Abraham Lincoln Association, both private groups that have raised money for the project, that no IHPA employee has authority to withdraw funds from accounts set up to pay for the project. According to documents obtained from IHPA via a Freedom of Information Act request, the Abraham Lincoln Association has more than $16,000 in an account reserved for the papers project and the university foundation has more than $317,000.
It isn’t clear why IHPA has cut off access to the accounts, but the agency has reportedly asked the office of the executive inspector general to investigate the project’s finances. In a Sept. 3 letter to the Abraham Lincoln Association, Garth Madison, IHPA chief legal counsel, asked the association to provide documentation of all transactions related to the project for as many years as the association has available as well as any documents that describe how the account is operated.
Robert Stuart, president of the association’s board, said that the association has provided no documents in response to the IHPA request, nor has the association been contacted by the inspector general’s office.
“I really don’t know what the IHPA is searching for, or the inspector general,” Stuart said. “I would say that the project has received accolades from across the country and globally. … Our concern is that the current problems or issues may endanger completion of the project.”
By refusing to pay its share of the project, the IHPA is “turning away approximately $600,000 in federal funds that would have otherwise come to the state,” Stowell wrote in a Sept. 10 email to Joseph Beyer, a top economic adviser to Gov. Bruce Rauner.
Stowell in his email told Beyer that the project’s staff will be laid off early next year if the IHPA doesn’t sign the contract with UIS that provides for state funding.
“While such a result may not be technically ending the project, the effect will be the same,” Stowell wrote.
Behind the scenes, the project’s backers have been working to build support.
“I’m trying to get the university to weigh in more aggressively on getting the federal money released for use,” David Racine, executive director of the UIS Center for State Policy and Leadership wrote in a Sept. 9 email to Stowell. “There’s not much that we, as a public institution, can do about state funding, although perhaps outside private individual(s) and groups can exercise some leverage there.”
In the resolution approved last week, the Abraham Lincoln Association board noted that the project has a history of receiving grants from prestigious groups.
“This includes a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that may be lost due to the recent action/inaction of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency,” the board wrote in its resolution. “The outstanding work of this excellent endeavor should not be shut down, especially when grant monies have been committed to fund its work.”
Derek Schnapp, UIS spokesman, said that the university is also concerned.
“The future is uncertain,” Schnapp said.
“We’re really, carefully, looking at everything right now. We really believe in this project.”
