ORONO, Maine - The University of Maine at Orono will cut $7 million from its budget in fiscal year 2016. Administrators made the announcement at a morning meeting on campus, where they asked faculty and staff in different departments for feedback on where to come up with the cuts.
Two major trends in recent years have left the University of Maine System in a tough spot financially. Enrollment has been shrinking. So has the amount of money the system gets from the state. At the same time, administrators have refused to raise tuition to make up the difference. And that's left the system facing budget deficits, and its seven campuses under constant pressure to cut costs.
"Starting the process and the campus conversations in October allow us an opportunity to have a meaningful dialog," says Ryan Low. Low has been on the job as the new chief financial officer at UMaine-Orono for six weeks. The university system faces the daunting challenge of cutting $69 million from its budget by fiscal year 2019. As part of that effort, UMaine-Orono has pledged to slash $7 million from next year's budget.
Low made the announcement at a campus forum Thursday morning. "The goal that we talked about today was minimizing the impact on students and student learning," he said.
Academic Affairs make up just over 70 percent of the total budget at UMaine-Orono. But Low says the department is only being asked to shoulder 46 percent of the cuts --$3.2 million of the $7 million. He says there will be no elimination of academic programs and says the university hopes to avoid faculty layoffs.
The university, meantime, is proposing reducing its administration and finance budget by nearly $1 million. Other cuts will come from development, the president's office, student affairs and research. Low says members of the UMaine community can offer suggestions about where reductions might come from by filling out an online form on the university's website.
"The goal, in setting these targets, is not that we'll get back $3.2 million worth of ideas in academic affairs and then we'll copy and paste them in a budget document," he says. "The real goal is that we get back some proposals, we consider them with the proposals from other areas of the university, and then, can think big picture."
Administrators will present a draft of next year's budget to the UMaine system board in December.
The president of the Orono campus's Faculty Senate did not return a call for comment by airtime.