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Last Updated: Mar 18th, 2008 - 14:26:34 |
Community colleges across California learned late last week of a statewide cut of $84.4 million that has left community college officials across the state scrambling to balance their budgets, with only three months left in the fiscal year. The cut reduces general support by $72 per full-time student, or about 1.5% of the colleges’ general per student funding.
The surprise is primarily due to a drop in property tax revenue, which was announced by the state Thursday, March 13. The annual state-approved community college budget includes a mix of the state’s General Fund and expected local property tax revenues. A similar shortfall is expected to occur for K-12 schools; however, under state law any shortfall in property taxes is automatically backfilled to K-12 schools by the state’s General Fund, but not to community colleges.
College of the Redwoods will receive approximately $400,000 less from the state for the current fiscal year, according to CR Director of Fiscal Services Ron Cox.
Cox explained that this is a one-time budget cut due to lower than expected state property tax revenues. “This will reduce our ending budget balance,” Cox said.
However, because CR’s enrollment was higher than expected this year, in addition to the college realizing significant savings due to a variety of internal budget cuts, Cox said the ending budget reserve should still be around $1.9 million or 6.6 percent. This is the same amount with which the college started the year, Cox said. Last year at this time, CR’s budget reserve was less than 3 percent.
“Unlike the midyear cuts that the Legislature acted on earlier this year, this is a truly three-quarter year cut, which significantly limits the options our colleges have to keep the impact away from students,” said John Romo, board chair of the Community College League of California (League) and President of Santa Barbara City College. In the announcement last week, Romo’s college was informed of a $1.1 million cut.
“We will continue to seek equitable treatment with legislation to ensure that student access and success is maintained,” said Scott Lay, President and Chief Executive Officer of the League. “In previous years, the Legislature has stepped up and agreed to fulfill the budgetary promise made at the beginning of the year, and we hope they will do it again.”
“The property tax situation could actually get worse with the April payment deadline approaching,” said Theresa Tena, Director of Fiscal Policy for the League.
The cuts are in addition to the $31 million cut from the community college budget by the Legislature during February budget-balancing actions. While some colleges intend to use state-required reserve funds to backfill the drop in property taxes, the action will exacerbate the impact of proposed cuts for the 2008-09 fiscal year.
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