On April 17, UCCS’ Budget Redesign Task Force hosted a town hall where they discussed the structure of the budget redesign and answered questions from staff and students.
According to Nancy Marchand-Martella, UCCS’ provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, the new model will go through a testing and evaluation phase — referred to as a “shadow year” — during the 2024 fiscal year. It will officially launch in 2025.
Marchand-Martella began the presentation by giving a brief overview of the redesign model. She emphasized that the new model will only include general funding, and that Auxiliary Services and gift revenue will not be included in this model.
Paul Mendoza, Director of Finance and Student Affairs, explained the reasoning behind this further into the event.
“Auxiliaries are kept out of this model. It’s general fund only, and that’s state-appropriated money, and tuition and fees. So, like bookstore [and] dining, they’re going to be left out of this model. They operate on their own,” Mendoza said.
Terri Wagner, Director of Campus Budget Operations and Mendoza then broke down the budget redesign further by explaining its three-pooled structure.
The first “Incremental Pool” supports academic and support functions on campus. The second “Performance Pool” benefits student credit hours, research and other performance-based measures across the different colleges. The third “Campus Performance Pool” involves campus-wide student enrollment rates.
Wagner also explained the process that went into determining the budget. She used a series of rough statistics that have not yet been finalized to provide an estimation of the totals.
She said that after making cuts to the base budget from the 2023 fiscal year and allocating funds to each pool, the estimated 2024 fiscal year budget will be approximately $131,104,646. Fiscal year 2023’s base budget — the starting number in the Task Force’s calculation — was $138,375,931.
During the Q&A session that followed the presentation, the Task Force acknowledged that they want the model to be transparent about where cuts will be made.
Rhonda Glazier, Director of Collections Management for the Kraemer Family Library, emphasized that the community will help each other work through the positive and negative moments that come with these budget changes.
“We actually talked a lot about creating a model that worked in good times and bad times that you can’t plan for, when you have to plan for both. So, this model was intended to try to help with that and to make it transparent and a simple way to figure out how we’re going to deal with less money if that happens,” Glazier said.
More information about the Task Force, their agendas and presentations from their meetings — as well as places to give feedback — can be found on their website.
The Budget Redesign Task Force is made up of 10 administrators and faculty members from different colleges and offices across campus. According to an article from Communique, their goal is to review the current budget model and make changes that suit UCCS’ needs.