A letter from Illinois’ university presidents sent last week to the governor and comptroller demanding a timeline for appropriated payments has gone unanswered.

Paul McCann, treasurer and director of business affairs, said the presidents asked for a timeline, but the conversations with the comptroller did not result in any further information.

“They have no way of predicting when they’re going to be able to make the payments,” McCann said. “The governor’s office said that we would (receive the full appropriation). Representatives from the comptroller’s office (have) said they cannot make any commitment, and their commitment is on how much is actually provided to us and when.”

Now three-quarters of the way through the fiscal year, the university has received just more than a third of its appropriation, causing a strain on its cash flow.

The letter said that without further payment the state’s universities would be forced to take even more drastic actions.

“We’ve received enough from the state to make it roughly to the end of April,” McCann said. “We don’t know where it’s going to end up. Certainly, we continue to monitor the situation and monitor our cash flow in order to make sure we know where we’re at, and then we’ll have to make some decisions as to where we’re going.”

Eastern’s appropriation for fiscal year 2010 is $50.6 million. Federal stimulus money makes up $3 million of this total.

Illinois applied for higher education stimulus funds in December, but has not yet received it.

“As a condition of that stimulus money for education they have to meet the Maintenance of Effort Level,” McCann said. “The state has to maintain our appropriation level from 2006 spending, which was $47.6 million. The state elected to fill our budget back up to the 2009 level with stimulus money.”

Illinois is legally required to meet this appropriation in order to receive the stimulus funds.

“If they have the obligation to do it, they should be sending us the money,” McCann said. “Nobody has the right to reduce that without taking it back through the legislature. Now, if you don’t have money, you don’t have money, so that’s where the whole thing gets complicated.”

The university communicates its financial needs to the state regularly, nearly once a week recently.

Though no timeline has been set, President Bill Perry said the state will be receiving additional revenues soon, which could put some much needed money in Eastern’s pocket.

“There will be some revenues coming in with receipt of personal income tax and corporate income tax, and there will also be some stimulus money coming in,” Perry said. “There will be a set of revenues that they are going to have to prioritize how they are going to distribute those, but we haven’t received any signals as to how they might do that.”

Sarah Ruholl can be reached at 581-7942 or [email protected].