NEWS
BY CORINNE BOYER
BUDGET CRISIS
HITS LCC
Instructional programs, faculty
positions face cuts amid budget
discrepancy conflict
hilosophy instructor Jeffrey Borrowdale has
taught at Lane Community College for 17 years.
In one month, though, his position as the school’s
only full-time philosophy instructor may be cut to
save money.
LCC has a $10.6 million budget deficit for the 2017-
2018 fiscal year.
As the college president, board, faculty and union strug-
gle to find a solution to the crisis, outgoing LCC President
Mary Spilde has been holding private meetings with board
members — bringing into question what is allowed under
Oregon’s public meetings law — to discuss the budget
shortfall.
An overwhelming amount of public testimony has been
heard during the budget meetings, calling for additional
meeting times to accommodate the number of comments.
Adrienne Mitchell, a member of the school’s Budget and
Finance Subcommittee, says 145 signed up to speak during
the budget committee’s April 19 meeting.
While cuts are being considered across the spectrum in
LCC’s 2017-2018 proposed budget — ranging from ex-
pense reductions in part-time classified staff to reducing
non-mandatory items like travel — the biggest proposed
layoffs will hit instructors the hardest.
The proposed reductions reduce philosophy course of-
ferings and eliminate religion, respiratory therapy and the
honors programs. The projected savings from those cuts
total $1.63 million, according to the 2018 Administrative
Budget Balancing Options Summary.
Despite a decline in enrollment from 40,099 students
in 2001 to 28,219 in 2016, management positions have
steadily increased while the number of full-time instruc-
tors has decreased.
Although financial cuts are necessary to balance the
budget, members of the LCC Education Association, the
faculty union, have asked the budget office to calculate lost
revenue from the proposed program cuts and include those
figures in the proposed budget.
P
LCCEA members insist the proposed budget is mislead-
ing because it does not account for the tuition revenue that
will be lost by cutting instructional programs. “In many
cases, the proposed savings, the numbers that the adminis-
tration has presented to the board and to the budget com-
mittee and the community, are simply false,” says LCCEA
President Jim Salt.
Before the Budget Committee’s public meetings, Spilde
held individual meetings with each member of the LCC
Board of Education.
Board Chair Rosie Pryor says LCC’s budget was dis-
cussed during her meeting with Spilde. “It’s her job to
work with each and every one of the board members indi-
vidually so that she can provide full information in a public
meeting session,” Pryor says.
Oregon’s public meetings law states that decisions of
governing bodies “must be made in public” any time “a
quorum is required to make or deliberate toward a decision
on any matter, or to do information gathering.” It does not
specifically bar “serial meetings,” in which board mem-
bers discuss the same information in groups of less than
a quorum.
A Portland lawyer specializing in public meetings law
says the individual-meeting tactic can be employed to
avoid transparency, but that the area of law on serial meet-
ings has not been decided.
“There’s no question that doing it one or a few at a time
avoids the requirements of transparency in Oregon public
meetings law. It’s an end run around the statutory require-
ments,” says Duane Bosworth, a First Amendment lawyer
who frequently litigates public records and public meet-
ings matters.
Spilde’s plan would cut nine faculty, four staff and two
managerial positions. Significant cuts will be made to early
childhood education, and the geography information sys-
tems program will be put on hold for a year — although
these programs were initially slated to be cut entirely.
Cutting religion, a core academic discipline, is a trav-
esty, says religious studies instructor Jonathan Seidel.
An adjunct instructor with 35 years teaching of teaching
experience, Seidel would lose his job completely.
The administration’s proposed budget — slated for a
vote by the LCC board on Wednesday, May 10, after EW
goes to press — fails to account for the loss of tuition rev-
enue, the union says.
The faculty union ran its own numbers, compared them
to the administration’s budget, and created a balanced bud-
get that retains all instructional programs. The union’s data
show that philosophy and religion bring in approximately
$337,000 each year, according to faculty member Adrienne
Mitchell.
“So there’s no accounting in the administrator’s budget
for the lost revenue,” Mitchell says.
Both Spilde and Pryor say lost tuition revenue calcula-
tions are included in the budget. They couldn’t, howev-
er, point to the figures in the budget and referred Eugene
Weekly to Brian Kelly, LCC’s vice president of student
services.
Kelly did not provide specific lost-tuition revenue fig-
ures. He forwarded an unsigned email from the budget of-
fice that reads: “The college is projecting a net zero change
to enrollment in 2017-2018. Any lost enrollment from pro-
gram reductions will be offset by increased enrollment in
career technical, transfer, and online courses through inten-
tional program growth in these areas.”
Board chair Pryor says she is not convinced by the fac-
ulty union’s budget.
“I’m not persuaded. I’m simply not persuaded,” she
says.
Spilde says the faculty union’s budget cut 40 percent
of managers, and neither she nor the board sees that as a
“reasonable approach” to balancing the budget.
Administrative bloat at Lane has increased over the last
decade. Beginning with the recession in 2008, the college
had 55 managers compared to 235 contracted faculty and
168 part-time faculty. In 2016, the number of managers
increased to 63 managers compared to a decline of con-
tracted faculty to 212. The number of part-time positions
increased to 189 during that time period.
Borrowdale says the budget does not include any real
cuts in management. “Managers went up during the boom
times and have stayed steady despite a big drop in enroll-
ment — so you’ve got few students, fewer full-time fac-
ulty, but for some reason you need more managers?”
LCC is facing scrutiny for its restructuring methods of
contracted faculty — raising concerns regarding potential
contract violations.
“In this case they are actually laying someone off so
they can hire more part time faculty because of the cheaper
rate,” Borrowdale says. “And that to me is an incredibly
immoral act, and I use that word because it’s one of the
subjects that philosophers teach of course is morality and
ethics. I think the college needs to take a philosophy class
in ethics.”
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May 11, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com