Looming budget struggles paint bleak future for MU

The Columbia Missourian

The trouble with news is that so much of it is true. If I’ve said that before, my excuse for repetition is the recent headlines.

“Nixon will face big budget shortage” was on the Missourian’s front page on Dec. 3. Inside that day’s paper was an Associated Press story headlined “Report fails 49 states for education costs.” Missouri is one of the 49 to flunk. In Tuesday’s Maneater, the top story was “Missouri Promise faces grim budget realities.” Then the bomb. From the Missourian’s Web site on Dec. 4: “University leaders asked to envision budget cuts of up to 25 percent.”

Twenty-five percent? That can’t be serious. It turns out, however, that the chairmen of the legislative budget and appropriations committees are deadly serious. …

The (recent) news forces the realization that, really, nobody’s off the hook. We might not have the burden of planning the budget, but none of us – students and wannabe students, parents, university employees and retirees, citizens, taxpayers – will escape the impact of the recession and state government’s response to it.

Wayne Goode, adviser to the Governor-elect, former legislator and perhaps Missouri’s most experienced budget builder, warns that the revenue shortfall for the current fiscal year, which stands now at $342 million, reminds him of the Great Depression. Mr. Goode, as I’ve observed him over the years, is not given to hyperbole.

Now take a moment to reflect on how our rulers in Jefferson City have responded to less apocalyptic downturns in the recent past. Gov. One-Term Bob Holden withheld appropriated funds from the public schools. The Boy Governor, our current one-termer, slashed the Medicaid roles. The university’s appropriation is still below what it was in 2001.

Already, the Republicans who control the legislature have warned that there’s no money even to restore the Medicaid cuts, let alone support new programs.

So Governor-elect Jay Nixon’s “Missouri Promise” – his plan to provide scholarships for community college and university educations for good students who can’t afford college now – seems almost certain to be a promise unkept. And that’s just one of those “grim budget realities.”

For our university, the grim realities suggest that “Compete Missouri,” the three-year program of salary increases intended to raise faculty pay from the bottom to the middle of our peers, loses the competition for diminishing dollars. And that was the case when the projection was a mere 5 percent budget cut. At 15 to 25 percent, the range now under discussion, even the system-wide hiring freeze won’t save nearly enough to satisfy our legislative masters.

Administrators are banking on another enrollment increase next fall to produce some of the income the legislature won’t deliver. The economics of that are simple. If you have 20 or 200 students in a classroom, there’s little or no extra cost for adding another one or 20. So the tuition revenue, or most of it, goes to the bottom line.

In years past, the university could more fully counteract the legislature’s stinginess by raising tuition steeply. Hence our failing grade in affordability and the need for that Missouri Promise. Senate Bill 389, which limits the increases to the rate of  inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index, took away that option. Legislators didn’t, of course, commit to making up the difference.

You can see why Mr. Nixon joined the throng of mendicant governors imploring President-elect Obama to direct some bailout money to the states. The feds can borrow, run deficits and just print more money. The state is constitutionally bound to balance its budget.

In a town where the two biggest employers are the university and the public schools, the budget news is all too true. Please don’t shoot the messenger.

George Kennedy is a former managing editor at the Missourian and professor emeritus at the Missouri School of Journalism.