Hard times forced NCSEA not only to cancel its annual conference in July at the Marriott Marquis in New York City, but also file for bankruptcy.

The alarm bells started going off at the end of last September,” says Colleen Eubanks, executive director at the Washington-based association. NCSEA had just closed the books on its 2008 annual conference, held August 3–7 in San Francisco, and the numbers were down. Attendance was off by almost 25 percent, with about 900 attendees, and revenues were down about one-third. Fortunately, the association hit its room block, just barely, and avoided attrition. But there were some unsettling trends afoot that made Eubanks nervous heading into 2009.

Colleen Eubanks

First, many states had already imposed travel restrictions on employees, and since the association is made up mostly of state workers in the child-support enforcement field, attendance was likely to take a big hit. Second, by mid-October the bottom had fallen out of the economy.

Soon thereafter, Eubanks started hearing from members that their states and municipalities were really feeling the stress. In November, NCSEA reached out to all of the state or county agencies that oversee NCSEA members and found that 25 states had already imposed out-of-state travel restrictions for all of 2009. By the first quarter of 2009, 40 states had imposed out-of-state travel restrictions on state employees, she says. “Since at least 70 percent of our attendees are employees of state or local agencies, we knew that it would have a huge impact on our conference.”

Next page: The Decision to Cancel