Logan Ramsey
News Editor
During the 2020 Spring semester, Idaho State University announced that they had incurred a $16.7 million budget deficit for the fiscal year 2021. The ISU Leadership Council, made up of administration, faculty and student leadership went to work, devising a plan to balance the budget by FY2022.
The university had a structural deficit of $11.7 million in FY2020 that carried into the current FY2021. This was due to continued enrollment declines contributing to a loss of revenue for the university. On top of this, once the pandemic hit, the Idaho State Government requested all state agencies return 5% of their funding, creating a $5 million shortfall and adding to the total budget deficit.
“We have identified a way to fully correct that deficit,” said Glen Nelson, Vice President of Finance and a member of the leadership council. The university has implemented plans that will create $4,750,000 of one-time savings, and created $11,779,001 in permanent savings.
The one-time savings were meant to make up for the temporary budget shortfall. They implemented an employee furlough program to create $2 million in savings and saved another $2,750,000 in salary savings. 1,200 employees were impacted in this program, and 33 of them didn’t have their employment renewed.
The critical thing they had to address was the structural deficit, “because that’s not sustainable,” Nelson said.
The Leadership Council, led by Jennifer Steele, Assistant Vice President for Finance and Business Affairs, put in an immense effort to balance the budget. In the end, most every area of the university had to reduce their permanent budget to make up for the shortfall.
The average budget reduction for all university divisions was 6.2%. Athletics reduced their budget the least, at 4.1%. The Office of the President reduced their budget the most at 13.4%.
The university eliminated 61 vacant positions, creating $3,832,500 in savings. This meant that departments would have to change their daily operations to compensate for having less employees.
“They would think about doing their work differently if it was an administrative function, maybe working collaboratively across units. If it was a faculty position it would mean looking critically on how we schedule classes and making sure we’re optimizing all of our sections,” Steele said.
The Leadership Council views the pandemic as an anomaly, so they don’t expect to incur the same costs that they did in FY2020, even if the campus is forced to close before the Fall 2020 semester ends.
“Those expenses are in the rearview,” Steele said.
According to Steele, the majority of the expenses from COVID-19 came from upgrading the campus for distance learning. ISU received $3.5 million in CARES Act funding that they used for this purpose.
“If we had to close the campus, which we are doing everything in our power to not do, but keep a safe environment for faculty, staff and students, I don’t think that’s going to add a significant amount of cost to the picture,” Steele said.
