Hi 
I would rather see the work done by a volunteer too especially if that meant someone that had a good understanding of LibreOffice and perhaps the wider FOSS community. However, paying for things sometimes makes the relationship clearer and easier to control.
Either way the trick is finding someone or a few people with the skills, time and motivation.
On a side-issue / tangent ...
We don't have to fight against OpenOffice anymore. Not that we were really fighting them before but now it's even less relevant. Similarly with AbiWord&Gnumeric, KOffice/Calligra, Google-docs and the rest of the OpenSource alternatives. OpenOffice is a great product and it helps us to help people start using it and to break away from trying to use MS Office. LibreOffice is a lot better than OpenOffice so people will move towards it once they realise they are both so similar.
The most difficult step is the 1st step. That important 1st step is to help people realise there are good alternatives to MS Office. If people think there is a squabble between OpenOffice and LibreOffice they may delay until they can see which one loses first! However if we can show people that both are strong products standing shoulder-to-shoulder as brothers (or sisters) then it gives them greater confidence in just choosing one (and then perhaps changing to the other one later when they realise that is easy).
Similarly i think it's important that people know they can keep running their old MS Office and just have LibreOffice / OpenOffice alongside so that they can gradually move over at their own pace. So, people have less to worry about while moving over.
All that is just my own opinion and i know others think differently.
Regards from
Tom