Well, now that we’ve all had a chance to digest the details of the final legislative supplemental operating and capital budgets, I’ve come to the conclusion that given the Governor’s desire to maintain a large budget reserve, the precipitous $423 million drop in revenues in February, the $91 million in increased mandatory expenditures that were estimated the same month, and high quality of the underlying budgets for higher education, all in all, the University turned just fine in the final supplemental tally.
Let’s look at the short list of accomplishments:
- $1.0 million in ongoing support for the eScience Institute.
- $3.0 million for UW Tacoma land acquisition and soils remediation.
- Increased funding for Star Researchers by $265,000 while protecting the base funding from reductions.
- Insured authorization for $45 million in tuition and fee revenues for the UW’s 2008-09 academic year budget.
We also managed to pass a few bills of importance and fix a few with problems. I hope to have a summary of those posted to the website soon.
Sure there are always budget disappointments, particularly not being able to plug the cut in last year’s budget for non-resident graduate students, the College of the Environment and domestic health metric research proposals and securing funding for childcare for faculty and staff. But, we live to fight for those another day.
Thursday is Sine Die and then the 2008 legislative session will be a memory. As usual, our preparation for the 2009 session begins this coming Monday because on Friday, I think I just might play a little golf.