Cuts made through shared governance process

The difficult process of severe budget cuts continues at Northwest College.

A table of planned budget cuts was among the items reviewed by the Northwest College Board of Trustees during Monday’s preliminary budget presentation for fiscal year 2017, which begins July 1.

Cuts identified so far total just over $2.36 million, down from last year’s $22.67 million budget.

However, Lisa Watson, NWC Vice President for Administrative Services, noted that final revenue figures won’t be available until later this month, and additional adjustments and cuts may be necessary. The budget will be finalized in a budget hearing during the July 11 NWC Board of Trustees meeting.

NWC President Stefani Hicswa said shared governance was an integral part of the budet-cutting process.

Through shared governance, faculty, staff and students are able to voice their ideas and opinions in decision-making processes.

Hicswa was hired three years ago in part because of her strong shared-governance history.

“Budget managers have not been involved to this level in previous years,” Hicswa told the board during its meeting on Monday. “Each group’s budget manager has been amazing to work with.”

“We asked folks to give us their cuts,” Watson said, “and we made some decisions at the 11th hour, based on their cuts and knowing that we have 30 days to go back” and fine-tune the budget.

One place managers and administrators looked for savings was support lines, such as the Johnson Fitness Center and academic computing, and making changes in fee structures to ensure those services were paying for themselves.

“Each budget manager made their own recommendations,” Hicswa said. “We went to people and asked what effects (proposed cuts) would have. Could you take it on? ... They were overwhelmingly positive.”

Hicswa said the last-minute nature of this year’s budget planning — made necessary by the delay in receiving revenue information — has made circumstances particularly difficult for budget managers.

Summer is the time they plan, make decisions and purchase items needed for the beginning of the school year. Instead, so far, they’ve been busy identifying cuts and whittling their budgets down, she said.

While they’re pleased by the cooperation and the work of the budget managers, Watson and Hicswa said they are concerned about the severity of the budget cuts and their possible consequences down the road.

“I wonder about these departments and their ability to operate,” Watson said. “We’re really talking about our ability to provide services to students. All these ... additional large cuts will start to really negatively affect us.”

Hicswa added, “We can’t just keep shrinking these budgets. Eventually we have to make some tough decisions.”

Fine-tuning the budget and making those tough decisions will be one of the main focuses for the coming year, she said.

Hicswa said the amount of time that went into preparing the preliminary budget was tremendous.

“This one-hour presentation represents hundreds of hours of work for Lisa (Watson) and Brad (Bowen, the college’s new finance director).”

Bowen, a certified public accountant with experience in financial statement audits, came on board at Northwest in mid-February. That was about the same time the Wyoming Legislature was in the middle of some serious budget cutting, including large reductions to state funding for Wyoming’s community colleges. It also was when the large size of reductions of Park County valuations was coming to light.

That meant Bowen’s first experience in developing the NWC budget also was one of the most difficult in the college’s history.

Still, though intense, “it’s been wonderful,” he said. “It’s been a touchy thing, but with the shared governance process put in place, the actual process itself has gone very smoothly.

“Everybody who participated in the budget discussion had great ideas,” he said.

The process began with a meeting with budget managers — the people who are responsible for the budget in each division or department — to provide them with a five-year comparison of the budget vs. actual expenses in each department.

“We provided those to budget managers to review to provide input on how they felt like they could contribute to the budget reduction,” and that information then was discussed within each department, he said.

Then administrators met with managers in each department to discus their ideas, and that information was compiled into a spreadsheet used to input the budget into accounting software “to ensure that we had a balanced budget.”

Additional information was sought and adjustments were made as needed.

The entire process took about three months — “basically, almost the entire time I’ve been here,” Bowen said.

Countless hours of work went into the process, “between budget managers and everybody else,” he said.

The fine-tuning will begin soon, he said.

“Now that we’re here, we have to really say, are we still going to be able to provide the appropriate services based on the budget that is now in front of us,” he said.

As a hypothetical example, he said, “If we took away all travel costs for recruiting, that just wouldn’t be feasible, because to get the students to come in, we have to go to them.”

When something doesn’t work, “then the regrouping will have to occur, and the decisions will have to be made on what is the next step, based on what the college’s need is.”

Hicswa added, “As we were going through the budget process, I continually asked budget managers what the consequences of their recommendations would be. Over the next several years, we must monitor expenditures and analyze the consequences of these cuts to refine the budget for future years — and, of course, adjust for changes in revenues.”