With the budget impasse in Harrisburg now hitting the eighth-month milestone, the impact on programs and services is very real and quite significant.
School districts, medical facilities, human service organizations, and other entities across the Commonwealth are being devastated by the inability for our elected officials to agree on how much and where they will direct our tax dollars.
Governor Wolf has been unable to bring the parties together to support a budget based on compromise and collaboration and, in fact, has threatened line item vetoes for budget proposals that did receive bi-partisan support in the Pennsylvania legislature.
The budget impasse in Harrisburg hit home again last week when employees at Penn State received an e-mail from Penn State administration asking all of us to implement bare bones spending in our efforts to do our jobs. Included in that was the mandate that travel, professional development for employees, and other non-essential spending are to be eliminated.
Later in the week, we learned that without the financial support from Harrisburg, Penn State employees who provide and support agriculture programs such as the extension and 4-H programs may be laid off in May if the budget isn’t passed. It is estimated that layoff will impact 1,100 members of the Penn State community.
And then it happened. Among the first items on the agenda for the Board of Trustees meeting late in the week included the approval of $151 million in numerous facility renovations which includes a $7.5 million upgrade to the security system for Penn State’s athletic facilities. These upgrades in security (turnstiles, systems to read PSU IDs, etc.) will cost an estimated $200,000+ per year to maintain.
Timing, as they say, is everything.
As my colleagues began canceling travel plans and department administrators met to figure out ways to cut even closer to the bone and employees in the agriculture-related departments face the fear of being without an income, it is comforting to know that we will be spending the money to keep high school kids out of Rec Hall.
Did anyone on the Board of Trustees think about the message that a vote to spend money in the same week that the university is responding to a $300 million state money shortfall might send to its stakeholders?
Student leader Kevin Horne offered some amazing insight into the decision which came after input from students. In a trustee finance committee meeting last November before the annual operating costs of the security upgrades were cut in half, Horne said ‘We’re at a place where we can’t find a $100,000 in the budget to hire a CAPS counselor so students’ mental health needs are met, and we’re about to spend $420,000 a year just to say we’re keeping townies out of the gym.”
The board’s decision is faulty in both timing and rationale. According to the reports, the security system for Penn State’s athletic facilities is one of the remaining recommendations left to check off the list from the Freeh Report that came after the Sandusky scandal, a report that has been largely panned in its process and content. The reactive decisions and programs that have come in the wake of the horrors of the Sandusky crimes, such as locking Rec Hall to outsiders and mandating abuse training for all Penn State employees, would have done little to stop Sandusky. (The Lasch Building is already locked.) Instead, we put policies and expensive systems in place to make us all feel better.
However, even if we agree that blocking the community from wellness facilities is a good idea, should that decision have been made this week?
When the vote of “yea” to spend money on flawed reports and faulty problem solving is made when the rest of the university starts to buckle down on spending, it sends the wrong message.
In this writer’s opinion, someone on Penn State’s Board of Trustees should have said: “Let’s table all spending decisions until Harrisburg gets their act together. Spending money while asking our staff and faculty to save money sends a bad message.”
Inevitably someone will argue that the money for renovating East Halls and for putting in turnstiles at Rec Hall (and space for support staff to sit and check identification) comes from a separate pot of money than the funds for graduate student travel to professional conferences. That may be true. To the Ag Extension employee who may be worried about making his mortgage or paying her electric bill in the face of layoffs, I’m guessing that won’t matter.
The message is one of using people to play politics and to pressure Harrisburg from a Board of Trustees that continues to be out of touch.
Until Harrisburg passes the budget, I am happy to support the hard-working, committed folks who make decisions in my college and my department at Penn State to prioritize need, watch our spending spending, focus on our mission of teaching, research, and service and continue to support our students. We will do our jobs, unlike our elected officials in Harrisburg.
The message and timing of our actions should be clear and consistent and should match what we say with our words.
