Colleges Dealing With One-Month Budget Shortfall

Monday, June 11th 2007, 5:39 pm

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) _ Oklahoma's state colleges and universities are scrambling to cover their budgets during the final month of their fiscal year because of a sudden $6 million reduction in state allocations.

The shortfall is due to less-than-projected state lottery revenues allocated to pay for bond debt incurred by the Oklahoma Capital Improvement Authority. State higher education officials had hoped the Oklahoma Legislature would pass a supplemental funding request to cover the shortfall, but that didn't happen.

That result was that on May 25, the State Regents for Higher Education approved the $6 million cut in allocations to all state colleges and universities for June to make up for the shortfall. State government's fiscal year ends on June 30, complicating the matter for schools which long ago had budgeted for the month at expected allocation levels.

``When you only get a couple of weeks' notice, that doesn't leave you much leeway as far as what your options are for dealing with a cut like that,'' said Steve Valencia, a spokesman for Northwestern Oklahoma State University in Alva.

Ben Hardcastle, the state regents' spokesman, said the cuts were based on the regents' funding formula. Thus, a larger college, such as Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, was cut $1.3 million, while a smaller one, like Northwestern Oklahoma State lost a little more than $87,000.

``Each institution has a different situation and will find a different way to respond,'' Hardcastle said.

At the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond _ which must cut more than $261,000 from its June budget _ officials are determined to ensure the cuts won't adversely affect faculty, staff or students.

``Because UCO has become one of the nation's most efficient universities, we have learned how to do more with less,'' UCO Executive Vice President Steve Kreidler said. ``Still, this hurts and we will have to continue to do even more with less.''

At Northwestern, Valencia said all non-emergency expenditures for June have been frozen. The university, which has about 2,200 students, will wait to fill some open positions until July and likely will have to use some of its reserve money, ``which is something you can do once, but you can't go to the well multiple times on that,'' he said.

Oklahoma State spokeswoman Carrie Hulsey-Greene said OSU's cut amounts to about 13 percent of the university's monthly state allocation. She said it is OSU's belief that the $1.3 million will be taken off of the cost of capital bond projects, and that the university will make a request, through the state regents, to state bond officials that the money be charged against the projects.

``No one is going to see an impact in the operations'' of the university, Hulsey-Greene said.

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