February 24, 2009 Budget
TO: All SDSU Employees
FROM: Sally Roush, Vice President of Business and Financial Affairs
Feb. 24, 2009
Budget Message #15
Last week, the governor and legislature reached agreement on a California budget solution that addresses both the current fiscal year and fiscal year 2009/10. We do not yet have a detailed analysis of how the changes directly impact SDSU; we anticipate information from the Chancellor's Office later in the week that will provide that information.
At present, the information available indicates that in the current fiscal year, the CSU budget is reduced by $97 million. At SDSU, our adopted budget for the current fiscal year was predicated on a reduction of that amount. Therefore, no further budget reductions are required of SDSU in this fiscal year.
In 2009/10, $31 million will be restored to the CSU, and the state budget assumes the CSU trustees will approve a 10% increase in the state university fee. However, according to the Chancellor's Office, mandatory cost increases and financial aid obligations will put the CSU budget into the negative column by approximately $22 million. Further, the state budget contains a "contingent reduction" of up to $50 million, dependent upon the amount of federal stimulus dollars the state actually receives.
A new aspect of the CSU budget results from a "swap" of federal stimulus funds for state general fund appropriation in the amount of $255 million in 2009/10 only. Given the existing plan to swap state general fund appropriation for lottery funds, it is unclear what the long range implications may be. Neither of these changes impacts the amount of funding available, but the changes do introduce a new element of uncertainty.
SDSU's percentage of CSU numbers is usually about 8.5%, so taking this all into consideration, SDSU's equivalent numbers range from a negative of $1.87 million to a negative of $6.12 million. There are many pieces of the 09/10 budget that are dependent on other factors, e.g. votes by the citizens of California on a number of items, the amount of federal stimulus dollars actually available to California, and actual tax revenues received by the state. At this point, we are still waiting for more definitive information.
The budget described above seems challenging, but manageable. We have been cautious and conservative in our approach to budgeting at SDSU, and that approach has served us well. As budget details emerge, we will continue these updates.