Freeing financial room in the University budget to accommodate an impending $290 million state budget shortfall could prove more difficult than extracting blood from a stone.
But University officials are fighting for every drop.
“I figured out the least painful way to make these cuts,” University Provost John Moseley said, “but I can’t look at this as an accomplishment.”
On Friday, Moseley unveiled the first segment of a two-part plan to reduce the University’s budget, in 2 percent increments, up to 10 percent. Gov. John Kitzhaber requested that each of Oregon’s seven public universities formulate such plans because the savings could help refurbish the state’s general fund, which projections show will be depleted by the languid economy.
But the money has to come from somewhere, and that means student services could be affected.
“Anytime you hold vacancies or restrict overtime and reduce salaries, you have some impact on student services,” Oregon University System spokesman Bob Bruce said.
The first plan, and the second, to be finished by Nov. 19, outline administrative and programmatic cuts as well as the impact such cuts would have on student services and academic programs.
The University’s plan to trim administrative costs demonstrates how anywhere from $151,074 to $755,369 could be cut from the roughly $7.55 million general fund administrative budget in the current biennium.
But University officials said administrative costs are so lean that trimming them could lengthen lines for student services such as student billing and financial aid by making it impossible to hire new employees.
“When I hear any talk about cuts in basic front-line student services, it makes me a little concerned students will pay a heavy price for that,” said Bart Lewis, who works in student billing. “We’ve tried to tell them systemwide that for every three classified workers, there are 1.4 officers of administration. What we felt is, we need more front-line support instead of officers of administration.”
But cut targets are limited in each department.
“You can’t ask the financial aid director to also run the business office,” said Francis Dyke, associate vice president of resource management and co-author of the University’s administrative reductions plan.
Reductions could also scale-back the University’s in-state and out-of-state travel budgets, limiting the school’s ability to secure research grants or recommend new programs to administrators who oversee Oregon’s public universities: the OUS.
“It’s hard for them to make more room for administrative savings,” said Michael Kellman, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “But the first priority is academic programs. At some point, these cuts might be big and bad enough that we have to cut academic programs.”