Expense Reduction at St. Eugene
Instead of the usual statistics and graphs that I normally prepare for the News and Views I thought I would take this chance to share some of my thoughts regarding our expense reduction progress as we approach the last quarter of our fiscal year.
As you know we, like so many of our parishioners, had a very challenging year from a financial perspective. Under Fr. Jerry’s leadership we have taken a number of steps to reduce our expenses these past months in light of reduced revenues:
• We renegotiated our contracts with a number of vendors thereby getting better terms for their services. Among others, this included our waste management provider, our phone service provider and our office printer services vendor.
• We reduced or eliminated use of outside services that were typically used for maintenance of our property. This, of course, placed a heavier burden on our staff to work more efficiently in order to get more done in the same amount of time. My thanks to our maintenance team for their help in reducing maintenance expenses.
• We reduced hours of our Administrative and Administrative support staff in an attempt to close the gap between our income and expenses without reducing programs or services
As you can see, we have taken steps to do all we can to reduce our current operating expenses in response to the current financial environment. I wanted to highlight these actions so that you can be assured that your parish team is doing all they can to maintain parish programs and services while continuing to take a close look at ways to reduce our operating expenses. At this point we are still lagging behind last year’s revenue totals. We are hopeful that financial support will increase the balance of this year so that we can end the year without a deficit. I hope you have found this recap helpful. I welcome any comments, questions or suggestions you might have regarding our steps to maintain a balanced budget.
Doug Byers
Director of Administrative Services
414-918-1110
