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The Lane Community College Budget Committee approved LCC’s proposed budget for the next academic year, sending the plan for final review to the college’s Board of Education.
The Lane Community College Budget Committee approved LCC’s proposed budget for the next academic year Wednesday, May 27, sending the plan for final review to the college’s Board of Education.
The board is scheduled to meet June 3, and the proposed budget is expected to be on the agenda. Under state law, the budget must be finalized by the end of June.
The Budget Committee, which includes all seven members of the Board of Education and seven community members, voted 9-3 to approve the budget. Members of the Board of Education voting to approve were Kevin Alltucker, Jesse Maldonado, Steve Mital, Jerry Rust and Julie Weismann. Board members voting against the budget were Chair Austin Fölnagy and Zachary Mulholland.
A related motion, setting the property tax rate for the 2026-27 school year at $0.6191 per $1,000 of assessed value, passed unanimously. The tax rate is unchanged from previous years.
LCC’s proposed budget for all funds is about $281.4 million for fiscal year 2026-27. 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 proposed budget includes cuts of about $4.2 million, including the elimination of degree programs in criminal justice and health information management. Those cuts include the loss of about 23 full-time-equivalent positions.
The proposal does not call for pulling any money from the college’s ending fund balance — essentially, its reserves — to balance the books.
The $4.2 million in cuts in the 2026-27 fiscal year budget 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 to a level equal to 10% of the general fund, as called for in board policy. The proposed budget projects an ending fund balance at the end of FY 2026-27 of about 6.2%.
LCC budget officials have characterized the proposed budget as “really tight.”
Amendments fail
The tightness of the budget prompted a pair of amendments, but the committee rejected both.
Mulholland proposed an amendment calling for a tuition increase of 2.1% instead of the 1.2% increase approved by the Board of Education earlier this year. Under the terms of his amendment, the estimated $300,000 raised by the additional tuition would be held in contingency.
In a presentation that accompanied his proposal, Mulholland wrote that approving a “reasonable” tuition increase could help LCC’s fiscal stability in the event of budget shocks.
“Approving this increase now can help avoid harder, more difficult, single-year tuition and fee increases later,” he wrote.
But Michael Olson, the president of the Lane Student Government Association, urged the committee to stick with the 1.2% increase previously approved.
Charles Kimball, a member of the Budget Committee, agreed.
“It appears that we made this decision in good faith, and it’s been already communicated,” he said. “I think we have to live with it.”
But he and other members of the Budget Committee urged that they be notified and consulted throughout the year on major decisions involving the budget, such as setting tuition rates.
Mulholland was the sole committee member voting for the amendment, which failed on an 11-1 vote.
A second amendment, from Budget Committee member Dan Isaacson, called for using assumptions from the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) instead of the Higher Education Price Index (HEPI) to determine cost of living adjustments for LCC managers. Isaacson said the move would save about $342,000 in the FY 2026-27 budget.
(HEPI measures general inflation affecting colleges and universities and often outpaces the Consumer Price Index.)
But, even though some committee members said the idea merited additional analysis, the consensus was that the amendment had been made too late in the budget process to be approved.
And LCC President Stephanie Bulger noted that “The Board of Education, in my time here, has never weighed in on managers’ increases in any way. … That’s an operational matter, and that’s in the hands of the president.”
The amendment failed on an 8-4 vote, with Isaacson, Fölnagy, Mulholland and Jerry Rust, the board’s vice chair, voting for it.
