By The Cal State University Board of Trustees voted Tuesday to request $237.6 million in state funding for the coming fiscal year, a price that’s $95.4 million greater than Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan for funding for the CSU.
Assistant Vice Chancellor for the Budget Robert Turnage said the budget request had been refined since September’s prospective request, which had asked the state for $250 million for the coming year.
“This remains a document that is partly a statement of the university’s needs. It has gotten serious input from all elements of our university,” Turnage said. “Everyone made a serious effort to try and strike a balance between what are our needs, recognizing that at the state level there are all kinds of competing demands for what are not unlimited state resources.”
Brown had attended the meeting for committee presentations but was absent during the Committee on Finance’s presentation and the subsequent vote by the Board.
During last year’s budget talks, Brown proposed a four-year plan that steadily increases state funding to the CSU from 2013-14 to 2016-17.
The governor’s plan calls for $142.2 million in additional state funding for the CSU for the coming fiscal year. The increase would come in addition to the $125.1 million provided by the state for 2013-14.
The CSU Committee on Finance referred to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office prediction that state revenue could increase by as much as 7.5 percent during the next fiscal year. Such a large increase in funding, the Board argued, would warrant an increase in state allocations to the CSU.
Turnage also said the Board is recommending a 5 percent increase in enrollment for next year, which would be funded by $79.2 million from state funds and the $96.7 million that would be generated by the increase in tuition revenue.
The funding would allow the CSU to enroll 20,000 more students, bringing total enrollment closer to the 2008-09 academic year’s peak enrollment of 357,222 full-time equivalent students. There are currently an estimated 348,000 full-time equivalent students in the CSU, according to the CSU’s 2014-15 Support Budget.
“Probably half of the students we’re talking about here would be community college transfer students,” Turnage said.
The increased state funding paired with a larger pool of students paying tuition would create a total of $334.3 million in additional funding for the CSU’s 2014-15 budget.
If the CSU received the $237.6 million requested from the state, the Board has budgeted $50 million of the funding for “Student Success and Completion,” $13 million of which would be used to hire more than 500 hire full-time tenure-track faculty system-wide.
Another $8 million of the Student Success and Completion funding would be used to hire 70 more advisers system-wide and contribute to various e-advising efforts already underway.
During the meeting, Trustee Steven Glazer initiated a lengthy debate about how to pay for the system’s maintenance and infrastructure needs.
The budget for the CSU’s state funding request also plans to take $15 million per year over three years to buy bonds, which would be put toward replacing and repairing old and worn facilities. Glazer, however, said he wasn’t confident that future legislators would provide enough funding to the CSU to pay back the bonds that the system would purchase.
“The concern would be that the governor changes, the legislator changes, and that the commitments that are made to us … may not be commitments that anybody can fulfill, and we’ve seen this before,” Glazer said.
Glazer proposed an amendment to ask the state for an additional $50 million to be put toward maintenance, but the amendment died on the floor, with Glazer being the only member of the Committee on Finance voting to pass it.
The other trustees, while acknowledging the possibility that future legislators might not provide funding to pay for the maintenance bonds, said it was the best option and that the amount that needed to be paid annually wouldn’t be large enough to pose a serious problem.
