Sopcich discusses the progress of current budget reductions
By Stephen Cook
President Joe Sopcich has been working toward his goal of reducing the college’s budget by $3 million over the course of the fall semester. Looking ahead to next year, Sopcich hopes to make more progress in the reduction process.
Could you tell me where you are in the process right now?
The first step was for the cabinet to bring reviews of their areas and try to evaluate those areas and then the second step was the creation of this budget discussion team in which that information was shared, in which they were invited to provide their own, to go back to their areas and collect insights and ideas and recommendations and things like that, which they’ve done. So now the cabinet has all this information and it needs to review it very closely and to see what kinds of ideas and suggestions perhaps can incorporate into the ultimate planning so that’s kind of where we’re at. It was kind of very compressed as we need to execute and get this through and I think we got a little compressed there but because a lot of things are going on and this is all, obviously this is very important to me, but time, we need to be able to meet a schedule and things like that.
Have you just been collecting information at this point?
Yeah, we really don’t have anything down and we kind of need to start turning that around so we need to come up with some tangible ideas.
Going into next year, do you know when those decisions might start being made?
There’s a budget calendar and if you look at that budget calendar that will tell you kind of when things fall because all that has to be loaded into the budget and then you get what the budget looks like and the trustees have to approve it. Keep in mind that the sooner we can get that done, the better off we’ll be because the year starts on July 1, so that budget calendar is very important.
Are you on track right now?
Yeah, we are and then you never know what can come up that kind of throws you off a little bit and potentially can push things back but you just got to keep on going when it comes to the budget, you can’t push it off forever, right? You’ve got to get it done, so that’s the challenge that we have; it’s a tough one, it’s a tough one for every institution and especially this year we’re trying to make some adjustments.
I remember you talked about department evaluations, how do you think that’s been going? Feedback received from people involved?
Well, it’s been interesting because some of the things that when we do it again, we’ll strive to do a better job of it, we can always do better. We need to look at greater consistency throughout the whole school with regards to some of the metrics, with as far as some of the service areas, some areas do a pretty good job of looking at that, we need to kind of perhaps model ourselves after some of the strong areas that do a good job in that and then other areas, I know on the instruction side they did quite an elaborate collection of information that they put together and that was all very positive. All of this –keeping in mind is just one data point, it’s one piece of the puzzle and just because it says something like that on a spreadsheet doesn’t mean you take it and run with it but it certainly is a good opportunity to kind of focus on those areas and ask questions as ‘Well why is this like this?’ and ‘What can we do to strengthen this or make it better?’
What’s it been like getting those people in the departments involved?
Well, it starts at the cabinet level and then as we reached out you believe that all the areas have been involved; certainly a lot of areas have been involved as far as putting information together.
It’s actually been very positive I think in the response from the different areas throughout campus and in a very encouraging way, but it’s always challenging to do, it’s always challenging for people. We’re very good at looking at other people’s areas, the challenge is to look at our own and try to perform some analysis on it and I think people are doing that, it’s very encouraging.
From your perspective, how do you think the budget reduction is going?
Well keep in mind that that is part of a plan a five year plan and it’s a five year plan that’s based on some very rosy projections over the next five years and so hopefully those things will come through. So this little step here, this adjustment, is significant for us and also I don’t think historically we may have never looked at it like this so that is, it’s something you can always look back and say you can always do better, right? I mean you can always do better – if the Chiefs had done a little bit better [at their game] they would have won, so it’s no different from this and that’s part of this process as we’re looking forward to next year on how we can strengthen certain areas with regard to the process itself.
Going into next year, what challenges you are facing?
When you look around at things – and you should be following the state issues – that’s $20 million [about 17 percent] of our budget. If that gets jeopardized then you really have to start thinking, ‘Ok how are we going to accommodate for that?’, [if] property evaluations don’t grow at 3 percent every year as we projected, what do we do about that? We have 2 percent growth for enrollment every year over the next five years, so that’s a big deal. That’s really the only thing we have control over is that growth in enrollment and so we need to do everything we can to try to make that work because that’s the only area of the revenue side of the budget that we have any real impact in – can’t do much about the property evaluations and as far as what’s happening on the state we can try to defend what we have, but we’re one piece of a much larger puzzle at the state level and so that’s a tough one so we try to hold on to what we have and go from there.
Anything else you’d like to add?
No, I think that the whole college, hopefully can feel good about how they’ve approached this and the information they’ve put together. I think the faculty has done a very fine job of collecting information and analyzing everything else that’s been out there, I think Dr. Korb is trying to marshal all this information and deal with that, the budget discussion team, which we’ve never had before, so that’s a positive too. So I think there’s a lot of positives and there’s a lot of things we can do better – kind of sounds like Andy Reid doesn’t it?
Contact Stephen Cook, editor-in-chief, at scook35@jccc.edu.