LCC board’s divisions on full display during July retreat

More than four hours into the July retreat of the Lane Community College Board of Education, the session’s facilitator stepped away from the PowerPoint slides in his presentation to offer advice to the trustees:

“I’m just going to be blunt, if I may,” said the facilitator, Luke Robins, a consultant with the Association of Community College Trustees and an experienced leader at community colleges. “You’ve got some trust issues. And you’ve got some communication issues that you need to figure out how you’re going to work through. And we don’t have enough time today to fix that.”

And that was in the middle of a retreat that lasted more than seven hours.

The retreat is an annual event for the board and LCC officials. It offers board members a chance to catch up on trends among community colleges and to consider the school year ahead.

But the July 19 retreat also highlighted issues that have marked the board’s often tense and occasionally testy meetings, including this fundamental question: Should the board serve primarily as a policy-making board or as an operational board?

For his part, Robins argued throughout the retreat that “high-performing” community college boards focus on policy as opposed to operations.

“You delegate day-to-day operations to the president, who in turn delegates to her leadership team,” Robins said. “Your job is ends; hers is means. You say you want to go over here. She says, ‘This is how we’re going to get there.’”

Operations or policy?

Not every trustee appeared to buy into that proposition, and the issue repeatedly came up during the retreat.

What about budgetary issues, some of the trustees asked — should they get the final say on those? What about decisions to cut programs? 

Those aren’t hypotheticals at LCC: The college is facing about $10 million or so in budget cuts over the next three years in an effort to restore its ending fund balance — essentially, its reserves — to the level called for in board policy. And the college has faced criticism over a recent decision to suspend enrollment for the 2025-26 school year in its licensed practical nursing program. 

Board chair Austin Fölnagy, in particular, maintained that the board should have a say in operational matters — and he confirmed that position in an email to Lookout Eugene-Springfield after the retreat.

At the retreat, newly elected board member Jesse Maldonado noted that four votes on the seven-member board could be sufficient to approve or reject cutbacks or veto individual lines in the budget and said LCC board members had taken such votes in the past. “You’re advising us not to do that,” he told Robins, “and you’re saying that that’s not the best practice, but we feasibly with a majority could do it.”

Robins cautioned that could move the board into an operational role: “What I’m saying is if your policy creates an opportunity for the board to get into operations, you maybe need to look at the policy and revise it.”

A little later, LCC President Stephanie Bulger said she wanted to get clarity on the point from the board: “What I hear is that you have the votes to ask me to bring any reductions to the board. … It actually sounds like something you’re going to do. … As the president, what this sounds like to me is that you want to be not a policymaking board, but that you want to be a board that delves into the means and not only the ends.”

Newly elected board member Jerry Rust replied:  “I don’t want to be categorized that way, that I’m drifting into operations,” but he added that he thought LCC’s decision about nursing was “a policy issue for me, not operations.”

Bulger responded: “Well, what about graphic design? What about the trades? … So, if you start to choose one program that you’re advocating for, then you’re not advocating for the entire institution.”

Rising tensions

Tensions on the board have become increasingly visible since late last year, when trustees deadlocked and could not choose a replacement for Lisa Fragala, who resigned her board seat after winning election to the state Legislature.

The position remained vacant until July, when Maldonado took his seat as the board’s seventh elected member. (The board also includes a student member, Amelia Hampton, but she serves on an ex-officio basis and does not have a vote.) Members of the LCC board are not paid.

Lingering tensions surfaced again at the April 2 meeting, when Kevin Alltucker — then the board’s vice-chair — read a letter accusing Zachary Mulholland, then the board chair, of abusive and bullying behavior, in particular directed at Bulger. 

In response, the college asked outside counsel to launch an investigation into Alltucker’s accusation and related complaints. The investigation is finished, but the college has not publicly released its conclusions. The investigation and subsequent report were not mentioned during the July 19 retreat. Board members generally have not made public statements on the complaints, citing the investigation. 

Both Alltucker and Mulholland remain on the board; their four-year terms expire in 2027. 

Before the retreat, at its July regular meeting, Fölnagy was elected the board’s new chair on a 4-3 vote, besting a bid from Alltucker. Fölnagy had support from Mulholland, Maldonado and Rust, with Steve Mital and Julie Weismann voting for Alltucker.

Although many matters before the board are decided unanimously, the overall split on the board seems to follow the lines of the leadership vote, with Fölnagy, Mulholland, Maldonado and possibly Rust on one side and Weismann, Alltucker and Mital on the other. Maldonado’s retreat comment about “four votes” may have been a reference to that split, and Weismann expressed worries about the comment after the retreat. 

Also at the retreat, the board heard a presentation about national trends in higher education and discussed Bulger’s goals for the new school year. The board recently gave Bulger a positive job evaluation.

At the end of the retreat, facilitator Robins returned to offer final remarks. He called the board’s attention to one of its goals, to build a better climate at the college — and asked trustees a question:

“What are you willing to undertake amongst yourselves to create better work, a better climate for your work?” Robins asked.

“If you don’t take anything else away from what I’ve talked about, that’s an important takeaway because … it’s a predicate to the second question, which is ‘What steps are you willing to take to build or rebuild trust amongst yourselves and with the board and with the president and the president’s leadership team?’”

Board reactions 

In an email sent after the retreat to Lookout Eugene-Springfield, Fölnagy reiterated his stance that the board has “the final decision-making authority in matters of college policy, programs, facilities and budget.”

He added that as the newly elected chair, “my intention is to do everything possible to refocus the efforts and energy of the board to address the internal and external opportunities and threats that we will face in the coming year. We need to put the well-being of the college and our mission above internal dissent to do the job that we were elected to do.”

Weismann and Mital had different takes about the retreat in emails to Lookout:

Wrote Mital: “Our Board Chair clashed with the facilitator repeatedly. He seems unwilling to accept basic principles of good governance, even when presented by a national expert with decades of experience.”

Weismann said the discussion about policy versus operations “became an exercise in entrenchment in which four members of the board kept repeating their opinion and belief over and over again — essentially telling the expert in the room that he was wrong, they disagreed, and had four votes, so it didn’t matter what he said.”

Weismann continued: “I am alarmed by the ‘we have four votes’ comment in the context of voting on an operational matter clearly in the domain of a college president and not the Board of Education.”

She added: “LCC is doing some amazing things. President Bulger has been highly successful in bringing new innovation and innovative programing to the college, with students having more ways to be successful. I am proud to be on the Board of Education and I will do whatever I can do to ensure the success of LCC.”