How many furloughs do you need to make up for a $23 million deficit?
The University of Idaho is asking eligible employees to take voluntary furlough to help deal with budget cuts, including the additional $1 million in reductions handed down from Idaho Gov. Brad Little’s office this month.
The governor has asked all state agencies to reduce their budgets for the current fiscal year by 1 percent and to reduce their budgets for the coming fiscal year by another 2 percent.
UI President Scott Green said in a memo that the initial reduction will amount to a roughly $1 million, one-time reduction, on top of the $14 million in cuts announced in October.
When Green hosted a budget forum earlier this month to discuss strategies to sustain these cuts, furloughs — unpaid days off — were among the possible solutions mentioned, as were privatizing certain university assets, outsourcing in-house facility services and discontinuing some academic programs.
According to the memo, the UI is also fleshing out voluntary separation and optional retirement incentive programs to reduce costs in long-term staffing.
…
Walker said the $14 million cuts for the current year have been made and now Green’s recently formed Sustainable Financial Model Working Group is investigating ways to augment university finance practices to sustain those cuts while maintaining and growing university business. According to Walker, there are two elements at play — short-term cost cuts to meet current budgetary targets and then identifying a new financial model that fits the university’s needs.
“That’s a long term fix — it’s kind of changing how we do our accounting forever or for the foreseeable future,” Walker said. “It’s everything from ‘how do I do something today that’s going to save me a few dollars’ to ‘how do we change the entire structure of how we deal with our financial model for decades.’”