$20 million — gone.

That’s what a 24 percent budget cut to the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences meant during Fiscal Years 2010 and 2011.

“This is a lot of money,” said Scott Angle, CAES dean. “The way the budget process works, we don’t give the money back to the state. That money wasn’t there to begin with — and [the state is] only funding us 76 percent of what our budget was two years ago. That’s what we’ve had to live with.”

In February, the University released a document to the Board of Regents listing $60 million worth of budget cuts. Though this document was titled as a “draft for discussion only,” it set off a wave of panic as administrators reacted to the effects the proposed cuts could have on their colleges.

“The original proposal back at the beginning of the legislative session was essentially to close 4-H camps and significantly downsize 4-H programs throughout the counties. None of that happened,” Angle said. “Yet there were still budget problems in the college that we have to address. We have developed our own college plan to deal with the 24 percent budget cuts which does have an impact on [4-H, County Extension and research farms].”

The college’s strategic plan included retirement incentives, selling several research farms and restructuring the Georgia 4-H Program and County Extension services.

“We’ve not laid anyone off,” Angle said. “The incentive was an offer for a one-year hire back at one-third pay. And a lot of people took that.”

Roger Ryles, the interim director of development for CAES, was one of the 4-H leaders who accepted the offer and retired from being state 4-H director in 2009.

“I reached retirement age and was offered the opportunity to do a little bit of an early retirement, help Extension and our college meet its budget cuts,” Ryles said.

For Ryles — who had been involved in 4-H in some capacity since he first joined in 1966 in the fifth-grade — retiring early set off titters of concern among some 4-H members that all clearly was not well in the agricultural world.

“I can remember knowing something might have been up when he was retiring so early because no one knew he was going to do that,” said Katie Comer, a sophomore from Carrollton who worked with Ryles as a state 4-H president. “I currently work at the Georgia 4-H Foundation as a student worker, and I remember the day last February when the budget cut came out that they were going to end all Cooperative Extension services for 4-H, and I remember it being a very big deal.”

And a “big deal” it certainly was.

“We’ve lost 88 county agent positions across the state,” said Beverly Sparks, associate dean for extension in CAES. She said 26 additional positions were gone as well — 19 specialist positions and seven administrators.

“We are going through, as we speak, where we are reanalyzing our resources and county presences,” Sparks said. “With all the budget cuts we’ve had and loss of all the positions, we will no longer be able to provide the same service to all counties.”

The frenzy to save 4-H

“When your budgets are cut 24 percent, you’ve got to downsize,” Angle said. “We crafted a plan where the damage is minimized. There is still damage — there is no way around the fact that what we are doing is something we don’t want to be doing.”

The original budget proposal called for 285 layoffs in 4-H and Extension, closing 4-H facilities such as Rock Eagle and maintaining only a custodial staff “until a disposition plan could be developed and executed” and closing 79 Cooperative Extension offices.

Angle said the programs will suffer from the cuts the college has faced, but they are not to the extent the University initially suggested.

“We are trying to make the most efficient use of the resources we have left,” Sparks said.

According to the college’s “Review of County Operations” presented in September, 4-H and Extension services will be restructured into six tiers. Each county in the state will be classified from tier one to tier six. Tier one will have no local Extension office, only a basic 4-H program using an agent from a neighboring county and will receive 50 percent of funding from the county. Tier six will have multiple county agents, various sources of funding, administrative support in a county office and program assistants.

“The main criteria [for tiers] would be the population of the county, the population of school-age children in the county, the presence of agriculture, opportunities for agents and shared resources across county lines,” Sparks said.

She said there are 25 tier six counties — many are in areas of intense agriculture and others are in the metro-Atlanta area.

“It affects 4-Hers and employees, because they of course get budget cuts and furloughs, but it affects the program as a whole,” Comer said of the restructuring plan. “If we don’t have certain money to set aside for renovations to Rock Eagle or for scholarships or for kids to do projects, then there’s no money for 4-Hers to prosper and grow.”

Research Farms

Much of the University’s effects on the state are the result of research done at agricultural experiment stations and other facilities throughout Georgia. The University’s proposal called for closing five of them — Blairsville’s Georgia Mountain Research & Education Center, Savannah’s Bamboo Farm & Coastal Gardens, Camilla’s C.M. Stripling Irrigation Research Park, Reidsville’s Vidalia Onion and Vegetable Research Center and the Attapulgus Research and Education Center.

Barring a miracle, CAES is about to lose three.

“We are moving ahead with two small pieces of property. One is called our Redbud farm, in northwest Georgia. There’s another — I guess it’s about 100 acres down around Griffin — that we are actively marketing right now,” Angle said.

The third farm, Angle wouldn’t talk about.

“It’s a high profile farm that is potentially going on the market,” he said. “We’re just not to the point yet where we even have permission to sell it but we’re talking about it enough that it’s pretty common knowledge that there’s one large farm that’s being considered.”

Though the first two farms were not on the budget proposal, Angle would not comment on whether this farm was on the original list or not.

He said CAES manages 17,700 acres of land, and recuperation of the sales of these farms can help the ones that remain.

“It’ll help us build up the farms we continue to manage and support in a more appropriate way with better facilities and better equipment, and reduce our operating costs, so it was a pretty easy decision to make that this was the direction we needed to go,” Angle said.

Though it is not financially associated with CAES, the State Botanical Gardens has an intellectual relationship with the college and both could be affected if additional cuts are made to the facility.

“We’re looking at how we can generate our internal budget so we’re not so dependent on state funding,” said Shirley Berry, the administrative manager for the gardens, in an interview Oct. 22.

Berry said one student position was lost because of FY11 cuts — which originally proposed to close the gardens entirely — but other than that the facilities were not devastated by the reductions in funding.

She said contractors and private donors continue to show their support for the gardens, but added the administration was revisiting the idea of charging an admission fee.

What the future holds

Berry and her colleagues might have to entertain those thoughts, however, if the FY12 budget requires further reductions.

“We had to submit a budget request to the Governor’s Office in September,” said John Millsaps, spokesman for the Board of Regents. “We really won’t know the outcome of that until the new governor is in office.”

At its August meeting, the Regents approved a FY12 budget request of $2.1 billion. This includes $145 million for student growth, $8.7 million for facility operation and maintenance, $18 million for health benefits, $4.9 million for new retirees’ health insurance, $1.7 million for the University/MCG partnership and a capital budget request of $432.3 million.

The new budget proposal, however, leaves plenty of room for cutbacks.

Millsaps said the Regents approved additional FY11 reduction plans for operating at 4, 6 and 8 percent — $77 million, $115 million and $154 million respectively, according to a Regents news release.

“Right now we’re operating at the 4 percent level,” he said.

If adopted, any of these three plans would carry into FY12, according to the news release.

Combined with the 10 percent proposed reduction plan for FY12 the Regents adopted at this meeting, the University System of Georgia could be down $192 million.

For CAES, this means nothing but bad news.

“I would not be happy if we had additional cuts imposed upon us in ’12,” Angle said. “That would be double jeopardy. We’ve already taken cuts in those areas, and I’d hate to have to get cut again.”

Angle felt for the others in the same situation as CAES, but said there was little he could do.

“We don’t have any ability to help pick up any of their lost resources because we’re struggling with much bigger budget cuts of our own,” he said. “We’re not the white knight who can ride in and save them if they do see budget cuts.”

CAES is primarily B budget — which University President Michael Adams said was less protected than A budget, which is mostly academic funding.

“The B budgets we believe are very, very important but the legislature chose to make bigger cuts there than they did in the A budgets,” Adams said.

Angle said he felt many other colleges at the University faced lesser cuts because they received stimulus funds — which will most likely be gone by FY 12 — and have more A budget criteria for protection.

“Let’s assume there are more cuts to the College of Agriculture, whether they’re fair or not,” Angle said. “We don’t have anything left to cut.”

Fiscal Year 2012 Budget

The FY12 budget request of $2.1 billion approved August 2010 by the Board of Regents for the University System of Georgia includes:

• $145 million for student growth
• $8.7 million for facility operation and maintenance
• $18 million for health benefits
• $4.9 million for new retirees’ health insurance
• $1.7 million for the University/MCG partnership
• $432.3 million capital budget request

State 4-H Tiered Map
FY2012 Recommended Capital Budget
Review of County Operations