LIVERMORE – Employees at the Washburn Norlands Living History Center will be eliminated after June 30 and some school programs suspended unless a corporate sponsor is found or the price of offerings to schools is increased.

Events already scheduled after July 1 as well as tours and live-in programs will go on because they bring in revenue for the center, Board of Trustees President Mitch Thomas said Wednesday.

New programs that would also bring in money or be self-sufficient would also be considered, he said.

A news conference to discuss the financial situation will be held at 9 a.m. today at the Norlands mansion on Norlands Road.

Programs scheduled through next month, including the annual Washburn Humanities Conference on June 14-16 and the Heritage Festival June 22-24, will go on, Thomas said.

Trustees met Monday and made the decision to reduce the budget by eliminating staff positions. Some of those people, including the caretaker and site director, will stay on as volunteers.

The center has three full-time employees, a marketing and development director, farmer and administration assistant in the office and five half-time employees as well as on-call interpreters.

“We’ve been borrowing from our savings for years to supplement school programs and other things,” Thomas said.

Trustees decided last year to look at programs offered to schoolchildren in Maine and determine if they could go on as they were.

Norlands is the family home of Israel and Martha Washburn, whose seven sons became prominent figures in history. Part of its mission is to provide living history programming to schoolchildren involving insight into the 1800s.

The center’s board decided the fair thing to do was eliminate overhead costs and “basically to take a breath, have a clean slate and start over,” Thomas said.

Norlands has been losing money on its school programs, he said. There were record numbers of school programs this year that served just under 5,000 schoolchildren from about 150 towns, Thomas said.

There were also less than 1,500 visitors throughout the year, not including school programs or live-ins, Thomas said.

Norlands used to be able to offer the school programs at below cost when it had extra money to do so, he said. But they’ve chipped away at their savings by borrowing from the center’s endowment fund.

“What we’re doing is we’re stopping that so that we get interest on our endowment, which would be able to sustain the buildings,” Thomas said. “If we went on a minute longer then we wouldn’t have enough in the endowment to do that.”

He said the endowment has about $300,000. The board wants to use it to maintain the buildings including the mansion, church, library, school house and barn. The endowment was built in the 1980s in a capital campaign under the guidance of founder Billie Gammon of Livermore.

Trustees launched a $1 million capital campaign earlier in May, he said. That’s essential to restore the endowment fund to its previous healthy state, Thomas said.

The Third Century Campaign marks continued commitment of the volunteers, staff, and the community toward the preservation of the Norlands site and its successful education and outreach programs, Thomas said.

The first major project will be the repair of the failing roof and walls at the Washburn Memorial Library.

“It was sad to let the staff know; it was sad for us,” Thomas said, of the board’s decision, “but once the sadness wears off this is a very positive thing to do.”