After three consecutive years of budget cuts, the University is having a hard time determining how else to tighten the belt.

Tim Burgess, senior vice president for finance and administration, said the University had to find what was the most important thing on which to spend money.

Burgess

“The real problem is that this is the third fiscal year we’re going through this,” he said. “One year you can kind of deal with. One year you can manage without a lot of significant reductions. Two years you have to squeeze and tighten up. But a third year and no formula growth puts our backs against the wall.”

The University received a $32 million reduction in state appropriations and a $16 million reduction in formula growth money for fiscal year 2012.

The University had been expecting these cuts for years and had operated more conservatively to offset them, but never expected to see the formula growth money disappear, Burgess said.

“If we had not been saving from one year to the next to the next and sort of building up a deliberate cushion this would be a lot worse,” he said. “The biggest problem we had this year was that the cushion we built did not anticipate the notion of the Regents that the state would not fund the additional formula allocations for growth.”

Burgess said the University would be able to offset reductions through its savings, and it would offset the $32 million hole in state appropriations with tuition and institutional

fee increases passed in April.

The 3 percent tuition increase at the University adds up to $4.5 million and the $250 increase per semester in the institutional fee adds up to $16 million.

Still, this does not cover all the cuts.

The University’s administration cut 5.5 percent of last fiscal year’s budget. The repercussions will affect the administration and the campus.

University President Michael Adams announced during April’s University Council meeting 5.5 percent of cuts would come from the administration while 2.2 to 2.5 percent would come from individual units throughout the University.

Burgess said the University will likely see a vacant position remain vacant, some deferred maintenance and repair maintenance that will go undone and cutbacks in hours of operation in order to fill the 5.5 percent cut.

He said the cuts may not look harsh on an individual basis; however, as a whole, they would be significant.

“I don’t know if I would cite [the Miller Learning Center running fewer hours] as an example of what would happen, but those kinds of things spread out across various units,” he said.

Burgess said the University will get a clearer picture of this on May 18 when the University must submit its budget to the Regents. The Regents will review the budget in June.

Burgess said he would like for political leadership to being investing more in higher education.

“I’d like to be optimistic and assume that that’s not going to happen. The state’s revenues have been up,” he said. “If we get yet another year of budget cuts, it gets exponentially more problematic and implications grow exponentially.”