Gov. Jerry Brown is set to propose a May budget revision Monday that will assess the magnitude of cuts being made to the Cal State University, which currently faces a minimum cut of $500 million from state funding for the 2011-12 school year.
The governor and leaders of the Legislature will examine the latest information on state revenues to create a contingency plan for all state funding, referred to as the May revision.
Robert Turnage, CSU assistant vice chancellor for budget, said Brown’s plan for higher education could potentially result in a $1 billion cut to the CSU. This is dependent upon whether three temporary tax extensions are passed by California voters.
So far, efforts to strike a compromise on the tax extensions have not been successful.
According to Turnage, the governor and leaders of the Legislature are going to advocate getting a final legislative action accomplished before the fiscal year ends at the end of June. He also mentioned that there is speculation that a special election, in which voters will be asked to ratify a decision, might be scheduled for September.
“[The governor has] made repeated statements that, if these tax extensions, for whatever reason, didn’t happen, that higher education, and specifically the CSU, could maintain doubling of the $500 million cut that the legislature has already approved for us for the next fiscal year,” Turnage said. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure that additional cuts don’t happen, but with statements like that floating around, we needed to have a conversation with [the Board of Trustees] about what to do under such a worst case scenario.”
CSU media relations specialist Erik Fallis said a number of things are being implemented to offset that cut, including adopting a 10 percent fee increase last November, enrolling 10,000 fewer students for the upcoming year and reducing funding to the chancellor’s office by 14 percent.
“It’s a highly contingent situation,” Turnage said. “It’s a highly variable situation. What we talked about was up to an additional 32 percent [increase in tuition], but there’s a variable feature involved.”
According to Turnage, if the CSU received an additional $200 million cut in funding, for example, that would only translate into a 16 percent tuition fee increase, rather than 32 percent.
As far as what the additional cuts may affect, Turnage said there’s nothing that can be done to alter spending for the fall term.
“We’re locked in for fall as far as number of students we’re serving and number of course sections we’ve scheduled,” Turnage said. “There’s so little ability to react quickly. The only thing we can scale back, if we have to, if there’s more bad news, is activities involving the winter term or spring term.”
Brown is scheduled to release the May budget revision at 11 a.m. Monday. However, Turnage pointed out that the revision is merely a proposal. After that, it’s up to the Legislature to decide what elements of the proposal it’s going to support or reject.
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