LCC subcommittee quizzes administrators about assumptions in spending plan

An ad hoc subcommittee of the Lane Community College Board of Education took a first crack Friday, Jan. 2, at a three-year plan proposed by college administrators to cut spending by $8 million over the next three school years.

The subcommittee — board Chair Austin Fölnagy, Vice Chair Jerry Rust and member Zachary Mulholland — posed questions about the plan, which is intended to boost the college’s ending fund balance (essentially, its reserves) back to the level required by board policy by the end of the 2029 school year.

Most LCC administrators — still on their holiday break — were not available to offer immediate answers during Friday’s meeting on Zoom. Mulholland said he would compile a list of the questions and submit it, with hopes that answers would be ready in time for the subcommittee’s next meetings, scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, Jan. 5 and 6, at 2 p.m.

Mulholland, who requested the creation of the subcommittee at the board’s Dec. 17 work session, said Friday that the subcommittee was facing a “ridiculously short timeline,” especially with the full board scheduled to meet Wednesday, Jan. 7. At that meeting, LCC administrators plan to ask the board to approve the plan.

Mulholland said Friday he wanted to prepare a document about the plan for the full board’s review before the Wednesday meeting.

The board tabled action on the plan at its Dec. 3 meeting, with some members saying they didn’t have information about what areas might be cut. Administrators have said they will present a list of potential cuts to the board this spring, but want the board to approve the overall three-year plan first, to help shape this year’s budget discussions.

At Friday’s meeting, subcommittee members said they wanted more information about the assumptions and projections LCC financial officials made as they determined the amount of money the school needed to trim and what areas were most in need of what officials called “strategic investments.”

About the plan

Board policy calls for an ending fund balance amounting to 10% of LCC’s general fund. LCC’s budgeted general fund for the current school year is about $108.1 million, and the projected ending fund balance is 7.45%.

Without making adjustments — cuts of $3 million from its 2026-27 budget and $2.5 million in each of the two following years — LCC financial officers have said the ending fund balance would drop to 5.03% by the end of fiscal year 2029. 

The plan also says that making those budget cuts would free money for those “strategic investments,” including eliminating deficits in certain LCC areas, developing new programs and funding deferred maintenance and information technology capital projects.

Mulholland said he had questions about some of the proposed additional spending, including a proposal to erase what the plan calls a “chronic deficit funding problem” in LCC’s aviation program. He said he was leery about setting aside a specific amount for that program “until we actually know how big the problem is and what the plan is to fix the underlying issue.”

Mulholland struck a similar note on the plan’s proposal to spend more on deferred maintenance. He agreed that LCC was “underfunding deferred maintenance substantially,” but noted that the staff is working on a plan to address those issues — and he said that plan, not the three-year proposal, should shape how much money to spend in that area.

Rust said he wanted to know more about the three-year plan’s assumption that personnel costs at LCC would grow by about 6% annually during the plan’s three years. Subcommittee members also wanted to know more about the reasoning behind the plan’s projections that LCC enrollment will grow by 2% annually and its estimate about the amount of property-tax revenue the college will receive.

During the 85-minute meeting, Fölnagy and Mulholland noted that the board of education had faced a similar issue with LCC’s ending-fund balance in 2019 and adopted a plan they said was simpler than the current three-year proposal. 

“And so I think part of the conversation is, does it make sense to do tweaks to the more complicated plan, or to try and simplify the more complicated plan?” Mulholland asked.