National budget cuts affect GC&SU
In the coming fiscal year, Georgia College & State University will cut approximately 2.5f the money it receives from the State of Georgia, according to a series of statewide budget cuts, said University officials Wednesday.
Dr. Rosemary DePaolo, the President of GC&SU, explained Wednesday that on request by the Governor of the State of Georgia through the Office of Planning and Budget, the school will submit a proposal this week on how it will immediately cut 2.5f the money received from the state for this fiscal year.
“Well, about two weeks ago we heard from the Chancellor’s office in Atlanta. He sent to us a letter from the Office of Planning and Budget, which is part of the Governors’ office. The letter stated that the Governor was requiring from all state agencies a plan of how to make a cutback this year of 2.5f state budgets, and for next year’s state budget a cutback of 5A DePaolo said.
“The Governor (of Georgia) has asked all state agencies to look at cuts of 2.5or the current fiscal year and 5or next fiscal year,” said Max Allen, the executive assistant to the President and director of university relations.
The cutbacks will take money only from the budget funds received directly from the state. The school uses most of those funds to pay the salaries of employees at GC&SU.
“The President is really concerned about the degree of the cuts and what they are going to mean. You know 2.5
nd 5
oesn’t sound like a whole lot, but campus-wide about 80f state money that we receive goes into salaries. On top of that, the Governor (of Georgia) said `no layoffs,’ so the 2.5
nd the 5ave to come out of the remaining 20eft over,” said Dr. Bruce Harshbarger, the vice president of Student Affairs and dean of students.
“Our budget is very lean regularly, so these were not easy cuts for us to make. Because the Governor also said, and we agreed with this, that we couldn’t cut people, and since almost our entire budget is for salaries, what we had left to work with was not a lot of money,” DePaolo said Wednesday. “For us that meant this year, a little over $660,000 cut would have to be removed, and then for next year, it will mean somewhat over 1.3 million.”
With two weeks to make the proposal, deciding on where GC&SU would cut funds from was hard and required lots of difficult decisions.
“About two weeks ago we started working on it, and they had to be in this week, so we didn’t have a lot of time to gather a lot of information and make a lot extraordinarily difficult decisions. We tried to involve as many people as possible, and on Monday we gave an open forum presenting generally how we were going to make those cuts,” DePaolo said.
“We have submitted a proposal to the Board of Regents that will have an impact on all state-appropriated operating budgets,” Allen said.
“Now, for example, in “Student Affairs” over 96f what we receive from the state is in salaries. We have very little operating funds that are state funds. So those cuts become really hard to make, and a lot of those expenses are fixed, like heating and air, and we use a certain amount of paper, and telephone and all that kind of stuff. So you really cant say, `Well, we’re not going to run the heating half the time or not use paper anymore’. So you get down to the stuff where you have to make some decisions, which is really not a whole lot,” Harshbarger said.
The majority of the money that was cut for this fiscal year, which lasts until June of 2002, will be taken from supplies, travel, advertising and some operating budgets. Some of the money that will be taken from operating budgets will be cut from the Student Affairs budget, but that money should not have too great of an affect on students.
“In general terms, it was taken from operating budgets, supplies, travel, and advertising. This year’s cuts were taken almost entirely from travel and supplies and then also a lot of times from money that’s left over when someone retires or stops being employed by the school and we don’t hire anyone for a while afterwards,” DePaolo said.
“I know some of the first things that went were student and faculty travel. There are also some things that directly impact students, such as graduate assistantships. These were prioritized all the way down, near the bottom, in the hopes that the state will find some cost savings and spare the things that are at the bottom of our list,” Harshbarger said.
“The kinds of things that we are going to do in Student Affairs is cut back a little bit on collaborative programs with academic departments, thus that is something we have really tried to prioritize,” Harshbarger said.
One of the points that Dr. DePaolo emphasized was the difference between state- appropriated money and money that is received from other means,such as the difference between the school’s auxiliary budgets and the state budget and how that money is received.
“Those are separate budgets; we’re only talking about state appropriations. That’s about 26.5 millions dollars. (I’m) not talking about student fees or the money (GC&SU) gets from tuition. (I’m) also talking about our Auxiliary budget because of all the auxiliary units here, such as the dining hall, the housing, the bookstore, and all those things that make money. Those things are on a separate budget, and that can’t be mixed with state money. So I can’t say, `well, you know the dining hall this year has made money and the bookstore this year has made profit, so I’m going to use the profit from there to make up for this problem in state budget money.’ That is a separate budget. So what happens with that is, when those things make a profit, we pour them back into auxiliary supplies. So for instance, when you see MSU being renovated, that’s not with state money, that’s with auxiliary money. So a lot of times people say, `Well wait a minute. You’re spending money on renovating that when you’ve got this terrible problem here; why can’t we use that money.’ All I can say is we can’t,” DePaolo said.
GC&SU raised tuition for this year in order to hire new faculty members. These changes were all put in place in order to lower the teacher to student ratio. The money that would go towards hiring new faculty was raised by a grant through the state and the matching of that grant through a tuition increase. Despite the current budget cuts, the process of hiring faculty should not stop or slow down, but the cuts might just change the emphasis of the hiring.
“Students, of course, are paying a higher tuition this year so we can hire additional faculty. So it’s really not appropriate to not fill those positions, and then to put that money into heating and air. Because we can’t tell students we are going to raise tuition to pay utility bills. So in that respect, the cuts should not impact students too much,” Harshbarger said.
“The whole point of this mission, the whole point of getting all that money, was to hire new faculty to lower the student to faculty ratio, and that’s still on track. There are some positions that we are going to freeze that we were hoping to fill. But we will probably just wait on hiring someone for those positions. There were also some technology things, some areas of technology, we are going to have to cut back on,” DePaolo said.
When asked specifically as to whether the state grant would be cut by 2.5
s well, DePaolo explained once again that those funds would not be affected by the state-wide budget cuts.
“We still have that (grant). That (grant) was part of a special funding initiative, and that, again, is separate from the state appropriation, which is a special category of state money. Part of what we might do is this: last year we quickly had to hire a lot of faculty and some of them are temporary. If those people are good, we might just keep them on for a year or so instead of funding search committees, which would use up state money,” DePaolo said.
Overall, the mission and goal of GC&SU, according to DePaolo, Harshbarger, and Allen, should not be affected greatly. Also, according to Harshbarger, students should have notice of any changes, since the effects of the budget cuts will have to be felt immediately in order to save the amount of money needed to meet the goal of cuts of 2.5
his fiscal year.
“President DePaolo is committed to this liberal arts mission, and we are trying to minimize any impact these cuts may have on students,” Allen said.
“In public areas you may find that they’re a few degrees warmer in the summer and a few degrees colder in the winter; the utility bills really eat things up around here. Also, the business and finance folks, I know, lock the lights on the tennis courts. Apparently they’ve been burning all night long, and I got a complaint about that. So I suggested to the person who wrote to me about it to make a proposal, to write out something they think would be a reasonable compromise, and we’ll take a look at it,” Harshbarger said.
“Above all, we are trying to protect, as completely as possible, instruction for the students. It will affect students, but indirectly, in that their professors might not be able to go to as many meetings. They won’t be able to come back with that incredible excitement that comes from going to a meeting in your discipline,” DePaolo said.
The changes to the 2001-2002 fiscal year budget have only been submitted to the Board of Regents. A possible strong economic recovery and some support from state officials and the Board of Regents will hopefully minimize the changes proposed by DePaolo.
“This hasn’t been approved yet; we’re just submitting it. It is going to have to go to the Board of Regents office first, then to OPB, then to the Governor, and then to the State Legislature. So then my hope, of course, is that all of those bodies, who have so wonderfully and profoundly supported our mission, will say `This mission deserves our continuing support; let’s not have GC&SU undergo cuts this serious or to this extent,’” DePaolo said. “This will start going into effect, theoretically, in December, but all this money that we’ve identified for the cuts, if we continue to spend as if we didn’t have these cuts, we wouldn’t have the $660,000 to give back, so they are basically in effect now. There were some economists who predict that this economic downturn in Georgia will hit us harder than other states, but we (Georgia) will rebound better than most other states. They also speculated that this downturn would last until mid-summer of 2002, and if that’s the case, then who knows, maybe we won’t need the extra 5rom next year’s budget.”
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Oct 19 2001. Filed under News.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
