By Courtney Spradlin thecabin.net Copyright 2010 The Cabin. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

It’s going to be up to department heads at the University of Central Arkansas to manage budget cuts passed down from the state.

UCA President Allen Meadors is allowing flexibility to department heads of each unit receiving the bulk of the $1.2 million in cuts. 

The Department of Finance and Administration and the Provost will cut the most from their budgets. 

Provost and Dean of Faculty Lance Grahn said units within academic affairs like undergraduate studies and the honors college, along with the six academic colleges, would divide the department’s $712,538 in cuts. “We’re not going to be lacking anything, we’re just going to have less flexibility as we finish out this fiscal year,” Grahn said. “Folks are going to have to be even more frugal than we would have been otherwise. It’s a complicated time for budget cuts.” Grahn said he and the administration have been preparing for the budget cuts since last October. It didn’t catch them by surprise, Grahn said. He said academic affairs was better prepared for this round of cuts than most units on campus. Receiving the largest cut, academic affairs was forced to “tightly manage” their budget for part-time instructors. But, according to Grahn, the university has not disrupted any students’ schedules or any students’ progress toward degrees.

Putting the responsibility of managing the cuts in the hands of vice presidents and deans was a good move by Meadors, Grahn said. “Because the plans have been pushed down to local management, it means we can be confident that these cuts will be done in appropriate and responsible ways by people who actually know what’s going on,” Grahn said.

Grahn said he felt the second budget cut was complicated for the university because of the timing. “Most people at any university in Arkansas would say that any time you cut a budget in the middle of an academic year, it can be difficult. Had we been given the entire budget cut in July, it would have been easier to manage, but the state didn’t want to impose the second cut until it absolutely had to. It waited until it didn’t see any other option. At least we got the budget cut in January, right as classes were starting rather than after classes were underway,” Grahn said.

The second largest budgetary restraint was placed on Finance and Administration in the sum of $360,512. 

Diane Newton, vice president of Finance and Administration, said the department would absorb cuts by delaying university funded maintenance, utilizing budgeted contingencies held for emergencies, actively managing utility costs and looking for efficiencies in each area that have not been addressed yet. “There’s no good time for cuts, but UCA was in the mode of being very conservative with its spending. Unfortunately that conservative spending was to help rebuild university reserves to a comfortable level. That will happen a little more slowly,” Newton said. 

(Staff writer Courtney Spradlin can be reached by e-mail at courtney.spradlin@thecabin.net or by phone at 505-1236. To comment on this and other stories in the Log Cabin, log on to www.thecabin.net. Send us your news at www.thecabin.net/submit)