WSU News Archive

By Hope Belli Tinney, WSU News

Bayly

PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University administrators have not started working on a plan to make additional cuts to the WSU operating budget, said WSU Provost and Executive Vice President Warwick Bayly, because the 17 percent cut on the table is untenable.

 

Bayly spoke with WSU’s Administrative Professional Advisory Council (APAC) for more than an hour on Thursday, discussing a wide range of topics including shrinking budgets, increasing enrollment, differential tuition and the importance of athletics. But much of the discussion focused on the budget.

 

In November, Gov. Christine Gregoire proposed that the state’s four-year institutions take a 17 percent cut in the upcoming biennium budget as part of a plan to deal with a $2 billion shortfall. At WSU, where the operating budget already has fallen from $530 million to $260 million in the last four years, a 17-percent cut would put WSU’s operating budget at $220 million.

 

"The only thing we’ve said is that the governor’s proposal is unacceptable,” Bayly said. The governor called the Legislature into special session in November in the hope that it would pass the $2 billion in budget cuts before the holidays, but she acknowledged on Thursday that is unlikely to happen.

 

WSU President Elson S. Floyd and Bayly had both been scheduled to meet with the APAC council on Thursday. But, Bayly said, the president had been called to Olympia by the governor. Joan King, chief university budget officer, accompanied Bayly to the meeting.

 

When asked if WSU’s stance — refusing to plan for a 17 percent cut — would exacerbate the difficulty of cuts later on, Bayly said the problem with creating a plan is that as soon as you do, the Legislature can decide the plan is a workable one, even if it isn’t.

 

"We don’t have a plan because this (current proposal) doesn’t warrant a plan,” he said.

 

Previous budget cuts have resulted in 570 positions lost, he said, out of a total workforce of more than 6,000 employees. Every job lost is devastating to the person who lost it, he said, but WSU has managed to limit job loss to about 10 percent of the total workforce, even while the operating budget has dropped 50 percent.

 

"Can we continue doing that?” he asked. "I don’t know; I don’t know.”

 

As part of her budget proposal, the governor also has proposed a temporary half-cent sales tax that would bring in nearly $500 million in fiscal year 2013 and would expire in 2015. If approved, much of that money would be used to restore education funding.

 

According to a story in Friday’s Spokesman Review newspaper, Gregoire told reporters on Thursday that she does not believe legislators will ask voters to approve the sales tax.

Bayly said he hoped people would "see the big picture” and support the increase. But he acknowledged that different people have different priorities and convincing the public of the importance of higher education is an ongoing challenge.

 

"We haven’t been able to convince people because we don’t have the numbers,” he said.

 

WSU is critical to the state’s economy not only by producing graduates with the skills to compete in a sophisticated, global economy, but also because of its contributions to research and development and local economies. Neither WSU nor the University of Washington have done a very good job of quantifying their economic impacts, Bayly said, but he has assigned someone in his office to work on exactly that. WSU has to be able to make its case with hard data, he said.

 

In other remarks, Bayly said the first semester of WSU’s largest freshman class has been fairly smooth.

"It is going better than I think we could have reasonably expected,” he said. He credited deans, associate deans, department chairs, faculty and staff for stepping up and figuring out how to put the necessary courses and programs together to accommodate the students.

 

Bayly also said it is likely that some form of differential tuition at the undergraduate level will be in place by next fall. WSU already has differential tuition for some graduate and professional programs.

The next APAC meeting is set for 1:10 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 12, in Murrow 53. For other WSU participating sites, go to http://www.apac.wsu.edu/APACMeetings 

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