As Pennsylvania’s budget stalemate reached its 100th day on Thursday, some organizations in Butler County say they face painful short-term layoffs or program cuts even if a budget is passed soon.

That’s the prospect at the Victim Outreach Intervention Center (VOICe), said Becky Rosenblum, the organization’s assistant director.

Rosenblum said the voluntary layoffs include herself, a domestic violence crisis shelter advocate, a housing advocate, a counselor and VOICe’s volunteer and outreach coordinator.

The employees will step down starting Oct. 15, Rosenblum said, and their positions will be vacant through Jan. 15, as VOICe looks for ways to avoid program cuts and make up for about $400,000 in frozen state funding it would normally have received by now.

“We are definitely not discontinuing any of our services at this point,” Rosenblum said. “Everybody is going to be taking on extra responsibilities to cover where needed.”

While the layoffs stave off program cuts, the organization will have to institute a waiting list for clients looking for counseling services — one of the layoffs is a counselor, Rosenblum said. It also is being forced to consider rolling back its normal, at-all-hours response to calls from hospitals and police stations for domestic violence and sexual assault victims.

“We look at critical services, and all of our services are critical,” Rosenblum said,” so it’s really a challenge for our leadership committee to work through this.”

The agency also has instituted a spending freeze, meaning it can’t send employees to regular training seminars, and will face involuntary layoffs in a month if state officials don’t pass a budget.

“VOICe is a dedicated group of people, and we’ll do anything we can so that we don’t have to shut our doors,” Rosenblum said.

She said the organization’s leadership committee would have to consider how many layoffs to institute if it came to that.

It’s believed such a move could allow the agency to remain open until February, Rosenblum said.

Even if a state budget were passed in the short term, the voluntary layoffs still would likely take effect for about a month because of the six to eight weeks it would take state funding to reach the agency.

Other agencies said they were feeling the impact of no state budget, but not in such an immediate way.

The Lighthouse Foundation, which serves low income families and residents in Butler and northern Allegheny counties, isn’t directly hampered by frozen state funding, according to executive director Cindy Cipoletti.

Cipoletti said about 70 percent of the foundation’s funding comes from private donors. A diverse portfolio of grants and a yearly budget is usually underspent, which means the organization can find ways to redirect money if state funding doesn’t materialize.

An interim and transitional housing program that is partially state funded is being propped up by cutting discretionary spending at the agency, Cipoletti said.

“We aren’t (projecting) long-term consequences at this time, and it’s mostly because of the amount of diversified funding we receive,” Cipoletti said.

The organization serves about 250 families each week at its food bank, and it also runs programs on financial literacy and income assistance — one area Cipoletti said she’s seen an uptick in calls as the budget impasse drags on.

“We have seen an increase in the amount of people calling and saying they can’t seem to find assistance from other programs,” Cipoletti said.

She takes issue when state officials in Harrisburg call the impasse an “inconvenience.”

“It’s not an inconvenience. It’s so much more,” Cipoletti said. “It’s detrimental to people’s lives.”

At the Butler County Children’s Center, which provides early childhood education services to more than 60 students in Head Start and Pre-K Counts classrooms partially funded by the state, the prospect of fiscal pain is much more immediate.

The center has already gotten a larger-than-normal line of credit because of the budget impasse, but that’s not a long-term solution to frozen state funding.

“It will start to hit us hard,” said Steven Green, the center’s director. “If we don’t have a state budget by the end of October, the board and myself are going to have to come up with a strategic plan on how we’re going to move forward without this funding.”

The early childhood education programs both started in September, Green said, so the agency expects to begin receiving bills for services by the end of October.

Educational institutions catering to much older students also say they are experiencing financial pain because of the budget battle.

Slippery Rock University, where about 2,300 students receive state education grants, has used about $3.5 million of its cash flow from students’ fall semester tuition payments to cover the frozen state funding.

University spokesman Rita Abent said the move amounted to an internal advance but still constituted “a real cost” to the university.

“At some point that cost has to be paid,” Abent said. “But as most schools, we made the decision that students should be held harmless and not have another thing to worry about when they come to school.”

Abent said SRU would be able to operate without tapping its cash reserves until March at the earliest.

At Butler County Community College, where about $3.3 million in state funding has been held up, officials are “starting to feel the pinch a little bit,” said James Hrabosky, the institution’s vice president for administration and finance.

The college has already borrowed $1 million from its book store enterprise account to fund general operating expenses like payroll, Hrabosky said.

“I have enough money in the bank right now to probably fund October and November payroll,” he said. “But December is where I’m starting to get really nervous.”

A second quarterly payment from the state totaling almost $2 million is due in December, Hrabosky said, and filling that gap isn’t a quick or easy process. To get a multi-million-dollar line of credit so the college could meet its internal obligations would take at least 30 days because of the amount — $2 million to $3 million.

If an impasse extends into 2016, Hrabosky said, the college is looking at an even more dire prospect: damage to its own credit rating.

The college has bond payments due in January for projects like its science and technology building and renovations to its Student Success Center. Hrabosky can’t predict how those obligations would — or could — be met without state funding.

“Are we possibly jeopardizing the college’s credit rating? That’s another discussion,” he said.