The Torch

Issue date: 5/22/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Daniel Harkey

Budgeting can be a difficult process.For students, it is necessary to balance in-come with expenses. At times, emergencies may come up, or there may have been a bill due that was forgotten about.
For LCC, it's no different.
When LCC prepares a budget projection, it includes everything that needs to be funded, including cost of living adjustments and filling vacancies. From there, the groundwork is laid to create the actual budget.
Recently, some LCC staff members have raised concerns about a $3 million budget error from the 2004-05 school year. This concern over the confusion of the error has generated even more confusion for staff and administration.
"I was shocked when that came back up again this year. It's three-year-old news," President Mary Spilde said.
In the campus-wide e-mails in which staff members were discussing the error, this confusion is clear. Some claim that it was never fully explained, but Spilde said that at the time, the issue was fully disclosed.
"It's not an error, it's just that the projections are different from the budget. There are things that happen throughout the course of the year that lead us to have to build off of the projection and then look at the budget," Spilde said.
"In the 2005-06 year, there was a situation where there was a number of faculty hiring going on that year, and unfortunately, the hiring documents weren't being routed and reported. So they didn't show up, and all of a sudden we start spending more money," Greg Morgan, associate vice president of finance, explained.
"The consequences were that there were quite a few faculty that were hired, that probably wouldn't have been hired, and at the same time they were in the middle of bargaining the faculty contract, and they were probably more generous then they would have been. They realized they overspent and hired too many people but they already agreed to these provisions, so they just bit the bullet," Morgan said.
Jim Salt, LCC Education Association president, said in a campus-wide e-mail addressed to all LCC employees that there were actually two large $2-3 million corrections in recent years that the staff may be referring to.
The first budget projection correction had to do with $3 million in ongoing salary expenses in the 2004-05 year, which contributed to the projected budget deficit for the 2006-07 year. The second correction has to do with last year's budget deficit increase from its projection to its proposed budget, attributed to not fully accounting for salary expenses for part-time faculty.

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