MnSCU plays waiting game on funding

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

April 29, 1997

By Devlyn Brooks

Staff Writer

Bemidji State University President Jim Bensen and Northwest Technical College President Ray Cross are playing the waiting game.

As the state Legislature this week appoints a conference committee to work out a compromise between the House and Senate higher education funding bills, Bensen and Cross anxiously await the compromise which so dearly affects each of their institutions.

The House approved April 16 a high ed bill including $1,029,500,000 in funding for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system which oversees BSU and NTC, the parent institution of Northwest Technical College-Bemidji. According to Cross, this represents an 11 percent increase from last year's funding for the system. The Senate's proposed bill, an 8 percent increase from MnSCU's funding last year, passed April 14 and would appropriate $1,001,200,000.

To confuse the matter even more, Gov. Arne Carlson has vowed to veto any higher ed funding bill that is "excessive," according to Cross, who is uncertain what that means. Carlson has suggested funding of $988,200,000, a sizable amount less than eve the Senate proposed.

Neither Cross nor Dave Tiffany, BSU's Vice president for university advancement, said they can predict what the conference committee will devise, but both hope it resembles more the House's bill than the Senate's.

Tiffany points to the fact that the MnSCU system has not received an inflationary increase in the last three bienniums, and meanwhile inflation, contract negotiations and other fixed costs have decreased every school's base funding by about 10 percent.

"How all this translates to this campus is difficult to tell," Tiffany said. "We just don't know. It's really unclear what's happening right now, and this is hampering our ability to plan effectively."

Whatever happens, Tiffany said he does not want to see a repeat of two years ago when the university was forced to eliminate 10 percent of the university's positions and lay off more than 15 people.

Tiffany said they were told to expect between 97 percent and 104 percent of the university's base funding from last year.

"That means we could have $600,000 less than we did last year, or we could have more than $750,000 more than we did last year," he said. "We just don't know."

Cross said he finds the House bill "fair," and that the Senate bill has good provisions in it but probably not enough funding.

"My sense is that (the conference committee bill) will be somewhere between the House and Senate amounts," he said, "but even if they say I'm going to get the base I got last year, I'm at a loss because I have increased teacher costs."

Tom Faecke, BSU's vice president for administrative affairs, said the university could handle a step back, but not a very large one.

"The sky is not falling by any means, but we've been pretty fiscally conservative," he said in a March interview. "If we were to get any leaner, I don't know where we would do it. I don't see any immediate threat to the quality of instruction of programs at BSU. But there's a potential for a long-term effect that we'll work hard to keep from happening."