“Plenty of work” will need to be done between now and April, as Allen County Community College officials begin putting together the pieces of the school’s 2011-12 spending plan.
Steve Troxel, ACCC’s vice president for finance and operations, told trustees Thursday that the anticipated revenues will fall well short of initial spending requests for the 2011-12 academic year — about $1.8 million short.
Troxel noted that the spending requests went up even though ACCC’s budget authority is certain to remain level or drop next year.
Troxel provided three reasons.
— Trustees already announced they would keep tuition fees static next year, using federal stimulus money in its stead. It should be noted that the stimulus funding will expire after 2011-12.
— State aid is not expected to increase much, if at all, over the next several years. Troxel said one projection indicated no increases in state aid for higher education should be expected over the next five years.
— And ACCC’s enrollment, after a decade of essentially uninterrupted growth, has come to a halt. The state funding formula is based, in part, on enrollment.
“We expected to plateau,” said Randy Weber, ACCC’s vice president for student affairs.
But instead, the college’s enrollment is down nearly 8 percent this spring.
Significant differences in pending requests and the final budget picture are nothing new, Troxel said. A similar cost-cutting process is undertaken each spring.
“But we’ve got some work to do,” he said.
Troxel said he hoped to have more concrete figures to the trustees by their April 14 meeting.
He offered trustees another caveat. The state funding picture may not be decided any time soon, “so a lot of my projections would be guesses.”
Troxel said his goal was to have a sufficient spending authority for the college to proceed with the budget process, and if necessary, make more cuts if state aid comes in below projections.
First budget picture shows differences
