President Elson S. Floyd and Provost and Executive Vice President Warwick M. Bayly met with university vice presidents, chancellors and deans Wednesday and Thursday (March 4-5) to review each unit’s preliminary plan for dealing with a reduction of up to 20 percent in the state allocation to the university for the upcoming biennium.
The Washington Legislature is scheduled to complete its budget deliberations by the end of April. WSU will not be able to finalize its budget before that time, but university leaders are preparing for a substantial budget cut.
This week’s meetings allowed each chancellor, dean and vice president to discuss his or her scenario for dealing with a 20 percent reduction within each area, and provided an opportunity to discuss how cuts in one area might impact other parts of the university.
In coming weeks, chancellor, deans and vice presidents will be refining their budget scenarios based on input they received at this week’s meetings.
Many of the ideas for savings and efficiencies that came out of the meeting will be taken to the University Budget Committee for discussion next week.
In December, Gov. Chris Gregoire proposed a budget that called for a 12 percent reduction in the state allocation to Washington State University. Since then, however, the economic situation has continued to deteriorate, resulting in projections of an even deeper budget cut for higher education.
The University Budget Committee page will no longer be accepting suggestions for possible budget savings. While there was an outpouring of useful suggestions from the university community after the page went on-line in December, in recent weeks the rate of suggestions has slowed considerably and it has been some time since new ideas have been presented.