BUDGET PANEL COMPLETES WORK; UNIVERSITY SUBCOMMITTEE PASSES SALARY PROPOSALS TO FULL GROUP

Southeast Missouri State University will face a deficit of more than $2 million next fiscal year if it enacts all budget proposals, including salary hikes, that have been presented to a budget subcommittee.

The subcommittee of the Budget Review Committee completed hearings last week. Most of the budget proposals have been passed on to the full budget committee for its consideration, subcommittee members said.

"The deficit we are looking at is over $2 million right now," said Mark Ellis, a student representative on the university's Budget Review Committee and a member of the subcommittee.

"Easily over three-fourths of the deficit is pay increases," he said. "All of the pay increase recommendations, we didn't touch them."

"The subcommittee just didn't want to mess with the salary situation," he explained.

Art Wallhausen, assistant to the president at Southeast said Monday: "Most of the (budget) proposals are being sent on to the full committee.

"There was a little bit of screening," said Wallhausen, but few of the proposals were eliminated. "All the salary proposals are going forward intact to the full committee."

Wallhausen, a member of both the budget subcommittee and the full committee, said the university cannot afford to implement all the budget proposals for the 1993 fiscal year.

"It's obvious from the total we cannot fund everything that is going to the full committee," he said.

Ellis said the subcommittee has identified a number of ways to cut expenses. But combined, they add up to very little in terms of the total budget, he said.

"What we ended up cutting out was maybe $150,000," he said.

Some of the suggestions include making athletics pay a greater share of its own expenses; turning the weekly campus newspaper, The Capaha Arrow, into a biweekly; and having Student Government, through student-fee revenue, foot the bill for publication of the Sagamore magazine.

Ultimately, students can expect a hike in incidental fees, Wallhausen said. "I think it is obvious there will have to be an increase for next year the question is how much."

Both Wallhausen and Ellis said the subcommittee offered no recommendations regarding hikes in student fees.

"We didn't look at it, but in the back of our minds, I believe it was there," said Ellis.

University officials had originally hoped to bring recommendations on fees to the March 5 meeting of the Board of Regents.

But Wallhausen said the budget committee and the university administration have not had time to finalize a fee proposal. He said a fee proposal likely won't be presented to the regents until April.

By that time, he said, the university's budget process should be nearly completed.

"By April, what you are usually waiting on is the final appropriation from the General Assembly," Wallhausen said.

Ellis said this year's budget review process has been an informative one. "In the past, we just got big numbers and we said, `Ah, this looks nice.'"

This time, he said, budget committee members have been provided breakdowns on the operating budgets of university divisions.

Ellis said the hearings this month, which involved more than 20 hours of testimony in five sessions, were "a very good beginning" to developing a new budget.