Thirty minutes from me, ninety from you. I want you to argue with this, not agree with it.
Friday August 21st 2026. Every figure comes from the board-approved FY26 budget and our payroll file. If one looks wrong, say so while I am on that slide.
The problem
That's a $1.9 million deficit a year.
Why the money is going away
SAMHSA, Crisis and Neonatal have all sunsetted. They were short-term grants with fixed end dates and no option to renew, and they were in the budget the board approved in March. Pathways is different: the grant ended, but Pathways continues as a program.
Our grant income drops from $2.87 million to $1.02 million, which is a fall of 65 percent.
What we did when the grants ended
| Who pays each dollar of salary | January to April | October to December | What it means for us |
|---|---|---|---|
| A grant pays for it | 2,595,195 | 1,103,545 | -1,491,650 funding gone |
| Clinical work we bill for | 924,635 | 924,635 | no change at all |
| Overhead, which has no income behind it | 626,897 | 2,118,547 | -1,491,650 now on us |
Total salary is $4,146,727 in every period of the board-approved budget. Only who pays for it changes. The two figures in the last column are the same $1,491,650 seen twice, not two separate losses. It moved from funded to unfunded, so this does not net out to zero for us. Hover any figure to see what it contains.
When a grant ends, the roles it paid for do not end with it. We moved those people onto overhead, where nothing pays for them. $1,491,650 of salary changed hands this way, and the amount we bill for did not go up by a dollar.
This is not $1.5 million of waste. Every one of those people is working, and total salary is the same $4,146,727 it always was. What we lost is the funding that used to pay for them. We did not replace it with work we can bill.
That is the real problem. Once a grant stops, the role it funded has to pay for itself through work we can bill, or it cannot stay. Cutting jobs is necessary, but on its own it does not fix this.
The plan, and the assumptions behind it
What closes the gap each month
The monthly gap as the savings arrive. September is worse because most have not landed yet.
The two consultants have already gone and the nine positions are decided, so those savings are certain. There is nothing to test, which is why they have no slider. Clinical income is the first slider because it matters most: at 80 percent of budget the monthly gap gets $57,000 worse.
Saving money, 1 of 4
A grant pays for the work, not for a person. So when we cut someone a grant was paying for, we move someone from overhead into that slot. The grant pays for them instead, and our own costs drop.
There are three limits on this, so we should not promise more than it can do. The person has to do work that genuinely qualifies under that grant. Each grant caps how much salary we can charge to it without asking permission first. And we have to keep records of who spent time on what.
Saving money, 2 of 4
That split decides who we tell first and who takes over their work.
None of this work stops. We are paying a contractor to do it when we need it, instead of employing someone full time to be available for it all year.
Before we tell anyone, I need two lists. First, which clients belong to each of the five people who carry a caseload, so we know exactly who loses their provider. Second, the name of the person taking each of those clients over, and the name of whoever picks up the rest of their duties.
We do not have either list today. No document we hold records how many clients each of these five people has. Erin can run that query, and I want it in hand before a single person is told.
Saving money, 2 of 4, the list
Salaries are from the payroll file, not my notes. Where the two disagreed I used payroll. Argue with this list. You know these people better than I do, so if someone belongs on it who is not here, or someone here should not be, say it now.
| Who | Salary | Cost with ~25% taxes and benefits | Works with clients |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taelor AlexanderBehavioral Healthcare Therapist | 69,903 | 87,379 | clients |
| Kevin ScruggsWORTH Youth Prevention Educator | 72,728 | 90,910 | clients |
| Brittany VedderMHP and Case Management Supervisor | 63,098 | 78,872 | clients |
| Elizabeth TownsendNAS Recovery Support Specialist | 53,431 | 66,789 | clients |
| Tara StueveNAS Recovery Support Specialist | 40,384 | 50,480 | clients |
| Dustin CossSystem Analyst | 88,438 | 110,548 | |
| Max BrandenburgFacilities and Safety Officer | 85,696 | 107,120 | |
| Cory ScottBranding and Graphic Design | 73,713 | 92,141 | |
| Brook SchaferProcurement Specialist | 56,602 | 70,752 | |
| Nine positions | 603,993 | 754,991 | 5 carry clients |
Kevin and Brittany sit in grant-funded slots, so cutting them does not save us their salary directly. The saving arrives when we move someone off overhead into the slot and the grant pays for them instead. The twenty-five percent is for illustration only and Ruth is working out our real rate, so $754,991 is an estimate. Nobody should quote it as a saving until she confirms it.
Saving money, 3 of 4
These are examples, not a list of decisions. The point is that we have been spending like an organisation with money to spare, and we are not one.
This is not instead of cutting positions. It is on top of it, and neither one is enough on its own. The gap is $1.9 million a year. Tightening spending gets us a few hundred thousand of it. The nine positions get us about six hundred thousand. Everything after that has to come from clinical work, which is the next slide. If we could have closed this with expenses alone I would not be asking anyone to lose a job.
Some of this is small on its own, and I still want it done. If we are asking a clinician to chase every billable hour, we cannot be spending loosely somewhere else. People notice, and they are right to.
Saving money, 4 of 4
I cannot do this part from a spreadsheet. I need Ariel and the clinical team to own it.
The question that actually decides it
This runs on the sliders from the previous slide, plus $77,000 of wind-down money that arrives up front. Nothing lands all at once: the jobs go on September 2nd, expense cuts land through the first month, and clinical improvement takes ninety days to build.
The last slide says where the money has to come from. This slide says whether it arrives in time. Right now it does not. Even doing everything on the last four slides we run out before December 1st, unless the SAMHSA replacement lands or we find roughly $100,000 of bridge money.
What turns this chart from a forecast into a plan is your numbers. Ariel and Dr. Shepherd own building it: which service lines, how many dollars, by what date, in writing. When I say clinical here I mean all of it, psychiatry and therapy and case management and intake together. I own holding us to it and I will be asking for it every week.
Put the real numbers in and this chart stops being my forecast and starts being our scoreboard. It is a hard target. December 1st is when we find out.
The monthly gap tells us how big the problem is. This slide tells us whether we still have cash on December 1st.
The new structure
Each one budgeted, staffed and reported on its own, with nobody responsible for moving a client between them.
PsychiatryTherapyCase managementCrisisLiving RoomPathwaysIntakeNeonatalWORTHOverheadEverything a client can be referred into sits under one leader, so the handoffs are somebody's job.
Overhead and admin sit outside because they do not touch clients and do not earn revenue. WORTH is an open question and I am confirming it before we finalise the structure.
We should do this even if we had all the money in the world. Right now a psychiatry patient who also needs therapy has to be handed between two departments that budget and report separately, and no single person owns whether that handoff happens. It often does not. Case management sits underused for the same reason. We wrote this down in the Stabilization Plan before anyone counted a single job, so it is not something we invented to justify the cuts.
This is too big for one person and it is not going to be run as one. Ariel is accountable for delivering it: she manages the effort, tracks it and holds people to it. It gets co-led with her, with Amanda from Crisis and Dr. Shepherd from Psychiatry alongside. Ariel owns the outcome. The work is shared.
Dates
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| Aug 31st | The Neonatal grant ends. |
| Wed Sept 2nd | Everything happens on this one day: the new structure, the changes to how services work together, the expense cuts, and the time off change. If we cut the positions without also changing how the services work together, the savings never appear and we will have put people out of work for nothing. |
| Sept 30th | The SAMHSA grant ends. It is our largest. |
| Sept to Nov | We track cash bimonthly, payroll by payroll. Where we are at sixty days tells us what ninety days will look like, which leaves thirty days to change course. |
| Dec 1st | We decide whether to merge, wind down, close, or carry on. If we do the work above, that is a decision we get to make. If we do not, someone else makes it for us. |
A separate decision, announced on the same day as everything else. It is the only part of this plan the board has to approve, and it goes to them with the updated employee handbook.
Time off, what we do now and what I am proposing
Today we hand someone a full year of leave before they have earned any of it. Sick leave and personal leave land on their first day, and ten vacation days land on day ninety. That means somebody can resign on day ninety-one and we owe them weeks of pay they have not worked for. We carry that the whole time as money we owe.
| Years working here | What they get today | What they would get | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| One to two | 10 vacation plus 5 personal, so 15 days | 10 days | 5 days fewer |
| Three | 15 vacation plus 5 personal, so 20 days | 15 days | 5 days fewer |
| Four to five | 20 vacation plus 5 personal, so 25 days | 15 days | 10 days fewer |
| Six and over | 20 vacation plus 5 personal, so 25 days | 20 days | 5 days fewer |
| Sick leave | 10 days | 10 days | no change |
This is a big shift and people will be upset about it. Everyone loses at least a week. People in their fourth and fifth year lose two. I would rather say that out loud on the day than have people work it out for themselves afterwards.
The reason I am still asking for it: someone at four or five years gets twenty-five days today, and with nine paid holidays on top that is close to seven weeks a year. No employer I know of gives that.
What the change is worth
| What the change does | If everyone loses five days | How reliable is that number |
|---|---|---|
| Reduces what we owe in unused leave, and what we pay out when someone leaves | 63,927 | Reliable, but it only turns into cash when somebody actually leaves. |
| Frees up clinician days we could bill for | 68,297 | I do not believe this one. Our own stabilization plan says several clinicians do not have enough clients to fill the days they already have. |
| Reduces payroll | 0 | We pay salaried staff the same whether they take the day or not. |
I am not going to present this as a cost cut, because it is not one. If I did, the first question would be why payroll did not go down, and I would not have a good answer.
The honest reason to do it is that it reduces what we owe and brings us in line with how comparable agencies run their leave. That is a good enough reason on its own.
How it gets approved
One more thing we cannot decide on our own. Pausing the retirement contribution usually needs a formal change to the plan document and written notice to staff. We should ask before we name a date.
Anything we cannot settle today goes on the wall. Every source behind these numbers is in the full working document.