The Council on University Planning and Budget discussed last year’s and this year’s budget for the university at its Friday meeting.

Paul McCann, the interim vice president of business affairs, gave board members handouts of last year’s budget and this year’s preliminary budget as well as two other documents explaining where the FY19 appropriated expenditures go and the amount of general revenue and income fund the university has received over the last 18 years.

McCann said the bottom line is that the university’s source of revenue has decreased significantly but enrollment has increased significantly.

“The other side of this is this is what we have to manage from day to day,” McCann said.

He said although the university has done “a lot of things right” by increasing freshmen enrollment for instance, he said from his standpoint, wearing the “green glasses” revenue is still down.

“That’s why when I start talking about (FY) 19 I’m trying to explain why we don’t have a budget yet,” McCann said. “Because we’re trying to use these numbers (from FY18) and trying to figure out how, with reduced revenues, we can do the same things and we’ve been doing a great job of that even with the decline in revenue.”

For FY18, McCann said the university’s budget was $77,339,496 and the university only spent $77,338,772.87, which was $773.13 less than anticipated.

McCann said with the reduction in mind, the university did “what it was supposed to do,” but it did go over budget in some areas like contractual services.

As for FY19, McCann said the preliminary budget is sitting at about $75 million but he expects that to change and will use the FY18 figures to help determine what the FY19 budget will be.

“Now, the good news is that ($75 million) is not going to stay, it will increase because we did do better in the way of enrollment than what we anticipated,” McCann said.

He said when the budget was created, they assumed enrollment, in terms of student credit hours, would be down about 9 percent, but it ended up being down about 3 percent.

Again, that is in terms of student credit hours, not headcount.

“From the standpoint of tuition, I only look at (student credit hours),” McCann said.

“Head count doesn’t do me a whole lot of good because I’m looking for how much tuition we’re going to generate from that classification.”

He also said when looking at the change in the overall budget number and in overall tuition, aside from looking at the total number from student credit hours, he also looks at the percentage that is taken off of the overall number because of waivers.

He said waivers account for about 20 percent of total tuition.

“When I try to budget I have to take into consideration that even though I got 7,000 students I’m not going to get 100 percent tuition, I’m going to get 20 percent less and that is a complicated factor because then I have to guess how much I’m going to lose from that,” he said. “It is complicated when you get right down to it.”

Therefore, for FY19, although it is early in the year, the tentative $75 million that it is at now will go up by about a million dollars or more, he said.

However, that will still be less than the budget in 2018, he said.

“So we’re working on how that is going to be allocated. Our anticipation right now is that most of that reduction will be taken care of by vacant positions that have not been filled yet,” McCann said.

He said much of what they need to do for FY19 has already been taken care of and there will not be measures such as a loss of jobs in order to come within budget. 

Analicia Haynes can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].