At this point, the state of Illinois has stopped making payments for Fiscal Year 11 and they owe Eastern about $21 million, said the university treasurer.

Paul McCann, treasurer, said they were told FY11 payments would be taken care of by the end of the year but they have not received FY11 payments for almost three months.

“Our total appropriation was about $47 million so they still owe us about 42 percent of that,” McCann said.

Even though the state is behind on FY11, the FY12 payments of about $7 million have been made on time, he said.

“It is nice to see that they are making timely payments, but it really does not make a whole lot of difference because they still owe us, at any given point, almost $21 million,” McCann said. “We are not digging a hole further but it is still an awful lot of

money from last year’s budget that they still owe us.”

McCann said the payment method for FY12 is opposite from what the state has done in the past. When the state was behind on FY10 payments, they paid those off before starting on FY11. This year, they are paying for FY12 but not the remaining amount for FY11.

“Right now, the state is somewhat behind the eight-ball also because they know that state taxes increased by roughly 60 percent, and they know they have that money coming in eventually, but then they have to make business and political decisions of who they are going to pay first,” McCann said.

To get by, they have borrowed from certain other funds on a temporary basis, he said. This also includes not hiring faculty, secretaries or administrators as others leave the university and cutting expenses.

He said cutting expenses includes not buying supplies such as computers and not doing as much construction on-campus.

“Unfortunately, I think it makes it difficult for a lot of the faculty who are not getting all of the supplies they might need,” McCann said. “We play a balancing game trying to keep enough money going into that process, but we do not always succeed.”

He said another aspect that is affected is when class sizes are expanded by an average of one person.

“At a cash standpoint we benefit by hiring less people, but at a student standpoint it’s a determent because there are more kids in each class,” He said. “We try to weigh that and make as little disruption as possible but we know, to some extent, that it is still present.”

McCann said they have borrowed from some unrestricted university funds to make up for the $21 million.

“Some of those might be some fee accounts that have accumulated over a period of time that we’d be able to use, but then at some point when we get the $21 million, we will reimburse those accounts,” McCann said. “There are certain pools of money that have legal restrictions on them like the bond revenue money students pay for room and board, and we can’t use them in the borrowing process.”

He said they have been diligent in being conservative by not spending money until they have it in hand.

“When a normal business gets behind this much they have to go to the bank or something to borrow, and we do not have that ability so we have to make operational decisions to limit how much money we spend to hopefully cover that $20 million,” McCann said. “It is a moving target because we don’t know what the state is going to do to us and when they are going to pay the $20 million.”

Rachel Rodgers can be reached at 581-7942 or [email protected].