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Sacramento, CA. July 29, 2009
Dear Colleagues
Following the release of the budget information, there is a lot of confusion, and I take responsibility for creating some of it!
First, I omitted Special Services for CalWORKs Students from yesterday's e-mail. The program is scheduled to take a 32% reduction, which hopefully will be restored to a 16% cut by federal funds. The program is "protected" from the flexibility language.
The major confusion has been around which categoricals take a hit if the federal funds do not materialize at the $130 million level assumed by the Legislature. As I mentioned yesterday, we now expect that the amount available to community colleges will be between $60 and $90 million. The amount will be determined by formula, and we hope to know the results in the next few weeks.
The Legislature did not provide specific guidance, and rather just affixed a $130 million unallocated reduction to the schedule of budgeted categorical items (ABX4 1, pg 334, Item 24). It would have been more helpful had the cuts been specified to each item, but this mechanism made it appear that we weren't taking as deep of categorical cuts as we actually are. Thus, Student Financial Aid Administration appears to get a budget increase, but the categorical budget assumes a federal backfill that appears overly optimistic.
Upon checking with the Department of Finance, we have been told that the intention is that all categorical programs take a proportional share. Obviously, this is frustrating for those programs that had been semantically identified as "Protected." That said, to the extent the protected categoricals do not share some of the cuts, Matriculation and other important programs would take a deeper cut.
There are several other areas that will need to be sorted out. Foster Care Education brings down federal matching dollars, and is nonsensical to cut. Career-technical education is a grant-based program, and the funds are distributed to colleges as part of grant agreements, which, under the budget language appear to be dissolved. Of course, we could make similar arguments about absurdities in the assumed cuts to most programs, many of which will be absorbed by local college general funds, thereby further degrading the quality of education we can deliver to students.
Our team is working hard with the Chancellor's Office and others to provide as much clarification to you as possible in a timely manner. While the news is almost uniformly bad, we understand the importance that having as much notice as possible to make difficult decisions.
This has been the most confusing of the fifteen community college budgets I've worked on, so I appreciate your patience as we work to clarify the intention of the Legislature and governor in their actions.
Scott Lay
President and Chief Executive Officer
Orange Coast College '94
Community College League of California