In a Dec. 12 email to UT faculty, Faculty Senate President John Nolt summarized the financial uncertainty plaguing the UT system.

“News on the budget continues to worsen,” Nolt said. “This week the Governor announced that the state shortfall has reached a billion dollars. This will probably translate into a 20 percent cut in state appropriations for higher education. At the same time we are facing increased costs for coal, electricity and natural gas. The term ‘crisis’ is not an overdescription of the situation.”

Administrators expect larger cuts than were sustained during the current fiscal year. Budget planning for the upcoming fiscal year has been ongoing since the completion of the current year’s budget this past summer, Interim Chancellor Jan Simek said.

“It was pretty clear to us last year as we went through the difficult budget process that we faced then that it was not going to be the last budget cuts we were facing, so we never really stopped the budget process,” Simek said.

Denise Barlow, vice chancellor of finance and administration, said that, contrary to common belief, budgeting is not a one- or two-time a year process.

“We are constantly looking at how are we doing based on how we thought we were going to do to gauge how our revenue’s coming in, how our expenditures are being spent over the year,” Barlow said.

Each unit began evaluating reduction possibilities as early as last summer, Simek said.

“It had to be an operation that comes from the ground up,” Simek said. “So the units that have to implement these cuts are the ones that are really best positioned to make decisions about how to do that. That’s the departments, that’s the colleges. So the process started there.”

Budget hearings for each unit were held on Dec. 8 and 9. Barlow said the vice chancellor for each unit would make a presentation concerning plans for expected cuts.

When actual budget reduction figures are announced by the state government, the administration will inform each unit of the percentage of cuts that must be made, and the unit will trim its budget according to the plan presented at the December budget hearings, Barlow said.

Including the New Chancellor

With the expectation of significant reductions for the upcoming year, the budget hearings were moved to early December instead of being held in March as usual, Simek said.

Another reason for moving the hearings to an earlier date is the fact that the new chancellor, Jimmy Cheek, will take office on Feb. 1, Simek said.

“(Cheek) will have to report to the Board of Trustees in February what our proposal is,” Simek said. “I feel it’s important that we do this and have at least the modicum of a plan in place, so that when he comes on he’s not faced with an organization he doesn’t know or understand and has to make major cuts to it.”

Cheek has not been involved directly in but is informed of the administration’s budget planning, Simek said.

Interim Provost Susan Martin also said that early planning would be key to an easy transition for Cheek.

“Chancellor Simek has wanted to help us through this so that Dr. Cheek would be able to come and give us a fresh perspective but would not himself necessarily have to be involved in this initial phase,” Martin said.

Cheek himself is not a stranger to budget troubles, as the University of Florida — his former employer — has cut its budget by 40 percent from what it was just over a year ago, Barlow said.

Simek also said that Cheek shares the current administration’s commitment to the core mission of the university — the students.

In order to protect student interests, other areas have been targeted to sustain the majority of the cuts, Simek said.

On Dec. 1, Simek announced the implementation of a new energy conservation policy in a statement on his Web site. The policy includes a decrease in standard building temperatures in the winter and an increase in the summer.

“What we want to do is be good stewards of the money and still have people be in environments where people feel they can work productively, or study productively, or receive instructions,” Barlow said. “So we’re thinking that’s an area where, if we’re just a little more conscious about our behavior that we can save the university quite a bit of money.”

Simek said that the policy is bound to have a positive outcome.

One Cut at a Time

“I think it will take a year or two to actually clear through and see (whether the energy efficiency plan has cut the budget by 10 percent),” Simek said. “It doesn’t matter. It’s the right thing to do. It will cut the budget. Any time you change people’s behavior patterns about consumption of energy, it has positive effects.”

With rising fuel prices, the energy conservation policy may be necessary in order for the university’s budget to break even in that area, Simek said.

Simek said that the university is past the point of simply leaving unfilled positions open and postponing maintenance, two approaches taken in this year’s cycle of cuts.

“When I first came here, there was a dean in Arts and Sciences,” Simek said. “We were going through budget cuts at the time. He said, ‘You can only quit cutting the grass one time.’ We already quit cutting the grass. You take the low hanging fruit and then you get into bad stuff.”

While the immediate future may be grim, Simek said he believes the university will recover sooner rather than later.

“It’s not the end of the world. We’re going to be OK,” Simek said. “We’ll have a tough year or two, but the whole idea has been to position us so that when money starts coming back in, we can put it very quickly to what rebuilds the fastest, and we move on out of there.”