SOUTHEAST COULD SEE BUDGET DROP

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Southeast Missouri State University would see a slight drop in its operating budget next year under Gov. Bob Holden's proposed state budget.

Holden's recommendation calls for the university to receive $50.44 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1. Under the governor's proposal, the appropriation for Southeast would drop approximately $10,000 from the current fiscal year, a decrease of less than one-thousandth of a percent.

Southeast also is missing out on River Campus funds in the new budget. The university was to get $11.95 million for its River Campus project under this year's capital improvements budget. However, the state has withheld nearly all of $161 million in planned capital improvements spending pending a Missouri Supreme Court ruling on litigation related to the state's revenue-limiting Hancock Amendment.

The court isn't expected to rule until late spring, leaving the River Campus funding in limbo. The campus, on the grounds of the old St. Vincent Seminary on Morgan Oak Street, is to house the School of Visual and Performing Arts.

Although Holden's proposed budget cut is virtually insignificant in Southeast overall budget picture, the governor's recommendation is approximately $5.1 million, or 9.1 percent, less than what Southeast requested for the coming budget year.

But the proposed appropriation for Southeast is still about $3.9 million, or 8.3 percent, higher than what the university received for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2000.

Losing salaries

Dr. Ken Dobbins, Southeast's president, said Holden's budget team removed a $70,000 salary for a rice genetics specialist and $149,137 for wildlife specialists, but added $209,000 for technology infrastructure improvements for the $10,000 net loss.

The cuts were targeted, Dobbins said, because those budget items had not been included in then-Gov. Mel Carnahan's budget recommendations in recent years, but were added by the General Assembly.

Dobbins said he hoped lawmakers would restore the cuts but that the university wouldn't seek any of its requests for new funding that were left out of the governor's budget.

"We are going to have to evaluate our programs and how we do things and do some reallocation," Dobbins said. "I'm sure there are ways we can do things better."

Dobbins stressed that the quality of Southeast's academic offerings would not suffer from the planned belt tightening.

State Rep. Jason Crowell, R-Cape Girardeau, said he is working to increase Southeast's share but was unsure how much additional funding he and other area legislators would seek for the university. Crowell is a member of the House Appropriations-Education Committee.

"As we go through the mark-up process, we will make sure Southeast has a budget it can live with," Crowell said.

Schools left out

All institutions under the Department of Higher Education were left out of Holden's capital improvement plans, so Southeast, with its stalled River Campus, wasn't the only university to miss out on funds.

Because the project is on hold because of unrelated litigation, Dobbins said it isn't vital that the state money comes through immediately. Dobbins said if the capital improvements funding is never released, the River Campus request would be resubmitted in the future.

Of the 10 public four-year institutions of higher education, including the University of Missouri system, all but Southeast would get at least small increases under Holden's budget proposal.

Holden's recommends spending an additional $20 million on the state's four-year institutions as a whole. But his proposed $811.4 million for those schools is more than $73 million less than what had been requested.

The University of Missouri system, which operates four campuses, would get the largest piece of the pie, $457.9 million. Holden's recommendation would give the system an increase of 3.6 percent, much less than the 14-percent increase sought.

Of the 10 four-year institutions, Southeast ranks fourth in state funding, behind the University of Missouri system, Southwest Missouri State University at Springfield, Mo., and Central Missouri State University at Warrensburg, Mo.

Most of the spending increases for the Department of Higher Education would go to the four-year institutions. Holden proposes raising the department's budget by approximately $27 million, or 2.2 percent, to a total of nearly $1.17 billion.

Considering that Holden has proposed cuts for some departments, Dobbins said higher education fared well in the new governor's first budget.

"When you look at the whole budget, higher education is very fortunate it didn't lose funding," Dobbins said.