JCCC Budget Priorities: Increase Tuition, Reduce Salaries

Posted to the Johnson County Community College electronic mail server, Infolist:

From: InfoList
Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2013 10:01 AM
To: InfoList
Subject: [infolist] A message from Joe Sopcich

As you know, we have several goals we need to accomplish this year with the budget to ensure that JCCC remains financially healthy. These goals are to:

1.  Stabilize the college’s reserves at $21-$23 million, or no less than 16% of our annual operating budget to allow for two months of operations should a crisis occur.
2. Begin working toward the goal of stabilizing the college’s capital budget at $10 million and replenish the capital operating fund so we can maintain our facilities at a level that serves our students. This is anticipated to take five years.
3. Set our salaries and benefits at a level we can sustain for the foreseeable future. 

For us to accomplish these goals, we need to do two things:

1.  Implement a plan for tuition rates that is consistent and informs students years in advance of what we’re going to charge so they can plan accordingly. We have proposed to the trustees a $3 a year tuition increase over the next five years. This means that by fiscal year 2018-2019, one credit hour will cost $100.
2.  Reduce the salary budget by at least $3 million. This summer we took steps that reduced the salary budget by $700,000. That leaves us another $2.3 million in cuts to consider. 

To accomplish this second objective, we are taking a close look at all programs of the college. Each program, be it an academic program or a support area, has been asked to evaluate its performance and contribution to the college, based on a variety of criteria, such as cost of the program, enrollment, enrollment trends and growth potential. Support areas will look at volume of work/projects, cost to deliver such volume and redundancies in service.

Again this year we will be following the PBS (Prioritizing the Budget Strategically) process, in which we ask that all expense lines are justified.  The budgeting process will get underway this month, following this timeline: