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by
Mike Allen, Associate Professor of Mathematics
In addition to being the 75th anniversary of our college, this year is the
75th anniversary of the invention of the television. Coincidence?
Maybe. There certainly are enough dog-and-pony shows put on around
here, though, to make it seem as though someone is trying to keep us
distracted. Case in point: a whole series of meetings related to
the college's budget for 2002-03. Despite the fact that they
included a lot of important information, they seemed to be designed to
argue that deep cuts were necessary, but not to get any feedback about
how to make them. One of the cuts took the form of delaying the hiring
of full-time faculty that we are obligated to hire. Our district was the
only one in the state that asked for a waiver from this requirement.
Also left out at these meetings were sources of income that the
administration thinks it can spend on any fool idea it feels like
funding. Chief among these is the surplus money generated by our
Professional Development Center, primarily through educational contracts
it lands with area businesses. Instead of having the Budget Review
Committee recommend how to allocate these surpluses, the administration
"suggests" to the PDC where it might want to have those monies
go. Even those suggestions are not then brought to the Budget
Review Committee. For example, if the administration wants to
transfer $150,000 from the PDC to pay for a new summer sports program
that generates no money from Sacramento or anywhere else, it just takes
the transfer to the Board of Trustees, and they approve it.
But what about the rest of the college's income? About a
year ago, it was pointed out that the administration was ignoring the
mission statement of the Budget Review Committee by developing budgets
without their involvement. It pledged to involve the BRC, but then
went right on making the decisions in Cabinet meetings to which the BRC
was not invited. Then, when almost everything was said and done,
they had two "joint" meetings of Cabinet and the BRC where, as
in years past, the BRC was presented with a fait accompli. The
only difference was that more members of Cabinet than usual were there
to witness this presentation. Many members of Cabinet didn't
bother to attend, however, realizing that all of the important decisions
had been made already.
At the second of these joint meetings, on July 16th, the
BRC was told that the final budget would be brought to them in August.
The idea was to let Sacramento work out its budget before we tried to do
ours. No such meeting was ever called, though. Instead, the
administration added in some items they thought were important, cut
money from our benefits, and sent the final budget to the Board of
Trustees without any review by the BRC.
At the August Board meeting, consideration of the budget was the
first item on the agenda. It was even listed before the open
comment period used for members of the public to address the Board about
agenda items. If that weren't enough, this was to be the
legally-required "public hearing" on the budget before
adoption. Robert Holmes (chair of the Board) took a few comments from
his fellow Board members, asked if anyone else on the stage had any
comments, then called for a vote. Not once during this public
hearing was the public asked to be heard from.
After all of this, am I the only one who thinks that input to the
budget process from the
employees
and students of this campus is being systematically avoided? The
administration must be held accountable for this pattern of misbehavior.
The employees and students must demand that the Trustees do so. &
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