LCC board approves budget for next school year, including $4.2 million in cuts

With a minimum of fuss Wednesday, June 3, the Lane Community College Board of Education approved LCC’s 2026-27 budget, which calls for $4.2 million in cuts and the closure of two degree programs.

The budgetary action was a highlight of a relatively brisk three-hour, 21-minute meeting, which also included:

• An update on a $30 million capital campaign by LCC’s foundation.

• A report on a campuswide survey suggesting that campus climate has declined from last year — and continued criticism in some public comments that the administration is losing trust with faculty, staff and students.

• Approval of a new certificate program in artificial intelligence programming designed to help students integrate AI tools within the software development industry.

Here are the details:

Budget passes

The resolution approving the budget, along with related financial resolutions, passed without opposition — and with very little comment from board members. 

Trustee Zachary Mulholland had an excused absence and was not at the meeting.

The quick action was a contrast to last week’s meeting of the LCC Budget Committee, when members tried and failed to make two amendments to the budget. The Budget Committee approved the proposal at that meeting and referred it to the Board of Education for final review.

LCC’s budget for fiscal year 2026-27 for all funds is about $281.4 million. But its general fund — budgeted at about $113.1 million — pays for most of the school’s operational costs, such as salaries, materials and supplies.

The budget includes a tuition increase of 1.2%, along with the $4.2 million in cuts. The cuts include the elimination of degree programs in criminal justice and health information management. About 23 full-time-equivalent positions will be lost.

The cuts are part of a three-year plan to trim spending at LCC by about $9.2 million. The goal is to return the college’s ending fund balance — essentially, its reserves — to a level equal to 10% of the general fund, as called for in board policy.

The budget projects an ending fund balance after FY 2026-27 of about 6.2%. The budget does not call for pulling any money from the ending fund balance to balance the books in FY 2026-27.

But LCC needs to identify another $5 million in cuts during the two years following the 2026-27 fiscal year.

Public comment during the meeting included a plea from one student, Alison Morris, who asked the board to consider the impact that shuttering the Health Information Management program would have on students.

And she criticized how administrators had communicated the decision.

“Many of us have struggled to obtain timely information” about the closure and transition plans, Morris said.

Capital campaign

Board members got an update about the LCC Foundation’s capital campaign, which is scheduled to enter its public phase this fall — but which already has raised $19 million out of a $30 million goal.

Wendy Jett, the executive director of the foundation, said the campaign officially began in July 2023 and is scheduled to run for seven years, “which is pretty typical for a campaign of this size.”

The campaign, titled “A Lasting, Local Lane,” aims to fund three overall areas:

• Half of the $30 million goal, $15 million, is earmarked for student support, including scholarships and basic needs, student outreach and onboarding, and creating a “welcoming front door” in Building 1 on the main campus for student advising. 
• Another $5 million is intended to purchase state-of-the-art equipment, in part for LCC’s new Industry & Trades Education Center. 
• Another $10 million will be used to offer additional support to students participating in internships, job shadowing or similar experiences and to provide college departments with discretionary funding for innovative programs and partnerships.

The board Wednesday approved six naming opportunities — primarily in the Industry & Trades Education Center — to honor campaign donors. Jett promised that she would return to the board at later meetings with additional naming opportunities as the foundation gears up for the campaign’s public phase in the fall. 

Gallup survey

Board members got a first look at the results of an annual survey by Gallup measuring employee engagement and climate at LCC.

“As you look at the scores, you can see that we’ve lost some ground in our results this year, roughly erasing the gains that we had made last year,” said Shane Turner, LCC’s vice president for human resources and labor relations.

In the survey, which was taken by 598 LCC workers (about 54% of the college’s workforce), respondents answered questions such as “How satisfied are you with Lane Community College as a place to work?” on a five-point scale, with higher numbers indicating increased satisfaction.

The mean score for that question in the most recent survey was 3.32, a drop of 0.27 from the last survey.

The mean score for another of the questions — “The mission or purpose of Lane Community College makes me feel my job is important” — fell to 3.68 from 4.02, a drop of 0.34. 

“We’re still better than when we started” administering the survey, Turner said, “but have some work to do. Work has already started.”

He said representatives from Gallup will train LCC managers this summer and that administrators will craft climate-improvement plans over the summer.

But some of the public commenters at the meeting blamed LCC’s administration for the drop in scores.

LCC faculty member Jay Frasier, speaking on behalf of the Lane Community College Employee Association, said the results suggest that “confidence in the administration’s ability to act ethically, with integrity, is even lower than before. … The administration could increase collaboration and trust simply by fulfilling their legal and contractual obligation to work with the unions.”

AI in programming 

Brian Bird, a faculty member in LCC’s Computer Information Technology Department, said the idea behind the certificate program the board approved is to give students a better understanding of how to use AI tools in software development. 

He said those AI tools do not replace the need for students to understand how to program: “We’re still teaching our students pretty deeply how to write code,” but also want to show students how to use AI effectively.

Michael Olson, the board’s student representative, asked about the environmental impact of AI, especially in driving the construction of power-hungry data centers. 

Bird said LCC classes teach about the ethics of AI, adding that he didn’t believe the proposed program would have a significant environmental impact. In part, he said, one goal of the program is to teach students that there are options to so-called “generative” AI. 

“So a lot of problems can be solved using AI that has been around for a long time, that doesn’t run in a data center, (but instead) runs on your local machine,” he said.