Fredonia faces budget blues

SUNY Fredonia, like the state of New York, is continuing to battle a budget deficit. But it seems that Fredonia's budget shortfall, although smaller, is sometimes even more difficult to deal with than the state budget.

Leaders at Fredonia who are responsible for coming up with the budget must do so based on assumptions about the state budget. If those assumptions are incorrect, the budget must be adjusted.

"It's hard because we're guessing what's going to happen at the state level," said Virginia Horvath, the vice president for Academic Affairs.

According to the Consolidated Operating Budget book, one of the planning assumptions made was that the Empowerment Act would be passed by the state legislature. The SUNY Empowerment Act would have given the schools more autonomy over tuition money.

Since the SUNY system is largely controlled by state legislatures, this act would have allowed schools to raise tuition but invest the money on campus. However, this crucial act was not passed and Fredonia must now come up with new ways to close the gap.

"Such a large percentage of our budget is people's salaries," Horvath said. To keep this cost down, the policy has been to keep vacant positions unfilled for longer periods of time instead of hiring more people.    

Fredonia is avoiding implementing layoffs. "It's not like we say to anybody who's working here ‘we're sorry, we're cutting your line," she said.

Fredonia is also hiring more adjunct professors than full-time professors to help offset costs. Adjunct professors have lower salaries and are not required to help shape the curriculum of a department. However, hiring adjuncts will ensure that students are still able to take the classes that they need.

Another area suffering because of the tight budget is equipment replacement. "The state does give us money for equipment but we've had to take that and use it just…to pay the bills," Horvath said.

She continued, "We've been careful; if equipment is dated, not working, we replace it but we're not replacing things as routinely as we should be."

Students will likely not notice much of a change as a result of the budget deficit anytime soon. For example, class sizes will remain small. "We don't have very many big classrooms, so our physical space requires us to keep our class sizes small," Horvath said.

But according to Horvath, "eventually there will be a gap in services." Students will still receive the services they need, it just may take longer than because there will be fewer people to offer them.