Update from CCFT President Paul Harvell
2008-09 and 2009-10 Budget Cuts

All faculty email from Paul Harvell on December 16, 2008

Colleagues, more info about the budget:

What we Know:

The state (along with the nation and world) is in a recession. State revenues are and will be below budgeted amounts.

What we Don’t Know:

How much revenues will be below past projections (current guess: $40 billion).
How much the state will reduce this year’s budget to deal with the decline in revenues (this is a “mid-year cut”).
How this will impact next year’s budget.
How education, community colleges, or Cabrillo will fair compared to others programs.

When will we know?

We still aren’t sure about this year’s budget, so it seems to me we won’t know next year’s budget until fall semester, next year, maybe even later. But the District will need to make decisions by March 7 if lay-offs are to be part of the district’s plan.

How to get more information:

Will we hear what programs will be cut and who will be laid-off this Friday?

I don’t believe so. This Friday will cover more about the process on how those decisions will be made.

What is the Union doing?

We are looking carefully at the budget to locate possible options in dealing with the uncertainty. For example, the district has had a large Net Ending Balance for the last several years, and CCFT is wondering how much of that might be used as a one-time bridge.
We are exploring voluntary workload reduction program (many have expressed interest in something like this) and voluntary conference fund reduction.
CCFT leadership participates in shared governance committees that oversee the budget issues.
General membership meeting during our Flex Day meeting (more to come on this in a separate e-mail).
We are tracking what faculty already have done, including:

A reduction of 32 adjunct faculty from Spring ’08 to Spring ’09 (that’s more than a 7% decline) with a decline of 276 TU’s to adjuncts (that’s an 11% decline)
A reduction of 8 full-time faculty next year from retirement (that’s about 3.5% decline).
The planned reduction of 100’s of TU’s next year.

What should faculty members be doing now?

As part of the shared governance process, budget cuts should be discussed within programs then be aggregated at the component level by the Vice Presidents. Faculty should be participating in discussions within programs and with their deans or appropriate administrators.

About the Adjuncts:

As shown in the data above, adjuncts are getting hit very hard with the TU reduction. CCFT asks that all faculty think carefully about your program needs and the use of overload and adjunct faculty. The loss of work and medical benefits to adjunct can partially be off-set by full-time faculty reducing their overloads.