Budgets

Budgets The Current | May 10, 1999

COMMUNICATION NEEDED ON BUDGET

The Issue:
The Budget and Planning Committee has raised concerns over the yearly reallocations that have hit the campus for the past several years.

We Suggest:
Consensus and involvement are the keys to less dissention over future decisions.

So What Do You Think?
Let us hear from you on this or any issue in a letter to the editor.

The recent flap in the Budget and Planning Committee over the rampant reallocations of recent years is apt to leave even the best of us a little dazed and confused. Why all the anger? Why all the bitterness? Why all the sudden?

In fact, this blow up has been a long time coming for many faculty who feel wronged and excluded by a budget process of which they do not feel they are a part. The difficulty and anger here clearly seems to spring from a lack of consensus over campus priorities. While such a consensus problem can never be solved to everyone's satisfaction, the level of stormy discontent would appear to indicate rampant and widespread unhappiness about what Faculty Council President Dennis Judd calls a "byzantine" budgeting procedure. While some may rightly disagree with the increasingly nasty tone of the faculty's rhetoric, there is a distinct need for a discussion process that would better facilitate decisions in which everyone can feel they have a voice. The chancellor has made positive steps in scheduling discussions on such issues as the Performing Arts Center and other controversial topics but the real test is whether the dissenting voices are actually being listened to.

As for the idea of "pay as you go" the administration's response has been vague at best. Straight talk is what's needed. If the chancellor wishes to choose not to budget according to this policy, that is her right. The committee is, after all, only in existence in an advisory capacity. The chancellor has final decisionmaking authority. Either way however the administration owes the campus a clear signal as to which strategy it wants to pursue.

No one is completely right in the debate, of course. Despite the claims of some to the contrary there does appear to be an actual enrollment shortfall, a serious decline in credit hours. Meanwhile the aftershocks of the five-year plan's austerity are still being felt. The administration's budgetary practice of imposing cost reallocations within a rate budget seems a valid, if exceedingly complex, way of dealing with that shortfall. The budgetary decisions being made in the chancellor's office are not easy ones and will not always be met with great fanfare. Consensus is vital but no choice pleases everyone.

As for the chancellor's reserve, such a reserve is neither unusual nor unwise for a manager to have on hand but the best way to end the debate and dissent is for the administration to take steps to publicize both the size, and to the extent possible, the sources of the reserve. Students and faculty alike should expect and be entitled to a clear accounting of such information. Still, this may not end the debate.

Perhaps, in the end, we will have to realize as Vice-Chancellor James Krueger puts it, "budgets can be looked at in a multitude of ways."