Some Massachusetts higher education officials said they were disappointed by Gov. Deval Patrick’s proposal for the 2008 fiscal year budget, but said they are hoping to receive more funding when the budget is finalized in coming months.
Joe Landolfi, spokesman for the Executive Office of Administration and Finance, which organized the governor’s proposal, said the expected $1.3 billion state-wide deficit forced the governor to appropriate less funding than he would have hoped to all areas – not just education – although Patrick appropriated a 5 percent increase in higher education funding from last year.
“We tried to spread the pain in the [smaller increases] that various agencies in the Executive Branch would have to take,” he said. “This is one of the realities of closing a 1.3 billion-dollar deficit.”
The 2007 fiscal year budget appropriated $992 million for all higher education spending, and Patrick’s proposal for the upcoming year calls for $1.03 billion. But the increase is not enough, Board of Higher Education chancellor Patricia Plummer told the Joint Committee on Higher Education at the State House yesterday.
“While the needs were great in [past years], they are even greater now,” Plummer said in prepared remarks for the event provided to The Daily Free Press.
Plummer said the increases to certain higher education programs would come from cuts in existing programs, such as the State Second Degree Nursing Program and the Cape Cod Environmental Technical Training Program.
State Sen. Stan Rosenberg (D-Amherst) said Patrick’s budget proposal lacks sufficient higher education funding and lamented that much of the budget simply moves funds from one program to another.
“That’s not good for the system, and that’s not good for the students,” he said. “That said, I think we need to keep our powder dry and withhold judgment until [it is finalized].”
He expressed concern with one provision of the proposal that would give the Board – instead of the Legislature – control of allocating funds to several campuses and would draw on three separate accounts for community colleges, state colleges and the University of Massachusetts.
Rosenberg said the provision would only be useful in streamlining the commonwealth’s higher education budget. He said the Legislature has given either too much or too little funding to different campuses in the UMass system in the past 15 years it has monitored funds. He admitted the Board must distribute the funds fairly to be effective.
“When you give a lump sum to the Board and you ask them to distribute it in an equal way, you would expect [a bias],” he said, saying it may take a few years to work out the “kinks.”
Board spokeswoman Eileen O’Connor said the provision would not drastically change any campuses because the objective formula used to calculate the needs of each campus would not change.
“This change does not affect the allocation of funds,” she said. “It only changes who runs the model.”
For now, she and other officials are waiting for the Legislature to decide on the final numbers before making conclusions on the budget.
“This is the beginning of a long budget session,” she said.