ORONO, Maine — University of Maine departments must identify $7 million in budget cuts, although top campus administrators are pledging to tighten belts without eliminating academic programs.
The announcement of the cuts to the Orono campus’s $242.2 million budget was made at a faculty and staff assembly Thursday morning and was received fairly well. UMaine President Susan Hunter told over 100 people in attendance that no academic programs will be cut, but added that it is too soon to tell whether there will be faculty or staff layoffs.
“We are doing everything we can to avoid faculty retrenchments or layoffs,” she said after the meeting.
The cuts for the fiscal year that begins July 1, 2015 come after the university eliminated 61 positions and pulled about $5 million from its reserve fund to pass a balanced budget for the current fiscal year. In March, the university announced it was facing a $9.7 million budget shortfall.
Ryan Low, the university’s vice president for administration and finance, said that each department has been given a dollar amount that it must cut. Department heads will submit statements by Oct. 22 describing how they will come up with the savings and the impact these cuts will have on their departments.
Richard Brucher, chair of the English department, said he was not surprised by the announcement and that the cuts were reminiscent of similar proposals in recent years.
“They made it as positive as they could,” he said. “What’s problematic is how these things play out.”
Of the $7 million that the university must identify, $3.2 million will come from academic affairs. That includes the university’s five colleges, the honors college and the cooperative extension.
Hunter emphasized the the cuts would be made with the intention of affecting students as little as possible.
“They are our core mission,” she said of the academic affairs and student service areas.
Low said that though academic affairs makes up 73.9 percent of the total budget, the cuts to that department make up only 45.7 percent of the total that will be cut from the university.
The university will cut $900,000 from administration and finance, $500,000 from development, $440,000 from the president’s areas, which includes marketing and athletics, $200,000 from research and $200,000 from student affairs.
Another $1.56 million is yet to be identified. Low explained that those savings will be found through collaborative work across different parts of the university.
An example might be that there’s a building that the university could give up, he explained.
The administrators received applause at the end of the presentation and several people thanked them.
“I feel informed,” said Mary O’Neil, associate dean of the college of education. “I look forward to being a part of the process.”
Low said there are many factors that could change the overall total that the university must cut or the share that individual departments must shoulder.
One of those factors is the state appropriation to the University of Maine System, which has remained relatively flat over the past 10 years, even as the cost to run the system has gone up. The state appropriation to the system was $183.2 million in 2008, but is $176.2 million this year.
In September, the board of trustees voted to ask the state to increase the system’s appropriation for the next two years to $182.2 million next year and $189.1 million the following year.
Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance Rebecca Wyke said that the increase is necessary if the university system is going to continue to hold tuition flat, as it has since 2012.
On Monday, Gov. Paul LePage said that raising tuition is not an option, though he did not say definitively whether he would approve an increase in the state appropriation if he is re-elected.
“I do think that more than just asking for money, they’ve got to have a plan,” LePage said, referring to the entire university system. He said he would like to see that trustees are making efforts to cut costs and increase revenue.
“The jury is still out on the progress they are making,” he said.
Wyke and UMS Chancellor James Page have said that the seven-university system must cut $69 million from its budget by fiscal year 2019. The budget shortfall is caused by a declining student population in Maine and the flat state appropriation, paired with rising costs, they say.
Last week, University of Southern Maine President David Flanagan announced a plan that would begin the process of cutting $16 million from that campus’s budget. The plan proposes cutting 50 faculty positions and two programs — undergraduate French and graduate applied medical sciences.
UMaine faculty and administrators are worried that the problems associated with USM are giving them a bad reputation as well.
“I don’t want that story to dominate everything in the state,” said Hunter, emphasizing that UMaine is not in the same position as its counterpart to the south. “It tends to overshadow everything that is going on.”
Unlike USM, UMaine has seen an increase in student enrollment in the past two years, due to an aggressive push to recruit students, particularly from out of state.
The amount that each university must cut is generated on the campuses with input from Wyke. The vice chancellor has proposed a plan that would give her office more power over the budgets and ensure that she is involved earlier in the process.
UMaine will submit a more finalized version of the budget to the board of trustees in December. The board will vote on the budget, along with the other six campuses’ budgets, in May. This year, the seven universities are submitting their budgets about four months earlier than in previous years to give the trustees more time to analyze the budgets.
Members of the UMaine community can fill out a budget feedback form to give the administration their input on the process and decisions being made around the budget.
