Gov. Bobby Jindal’s budget won’t propose any cuts to public college campuses, sparing them another round of reductions that higher education leaders had said could cripple the schools, the governor’s chief of staff said Thursday.
“There will be no cut in the budget to higher education schools,” Timmy Teepell told The Associated Press, offering a preview of the governor’s 2010-11 spending proposal that will be unveiled Friday.
Under the governor’s plan, Teepell said the campuses would maintain the current level of state funding they are receiving, after three rounds of budget cuts that reduced funding by $250 million over the last year and a half.
The spending plan for the new fiscal year that begins July 1 would keep the schools from the cuts proposed for other state agencies. The state is grappling with a $1 billion gap in what would be needed to continue all state services and cope with inflation and other mandated cost increases.
While campuses will be protected, Jindal will propose cutting university system management boards by 30 percent or about $5 million, Teepell said, claiming the boards can be run more efficiently and with less money.
Teepell said the governor wants to protect the schools while the state embarks on a restructuring of Louisiana’s college systems. A panel of higher education experts recently suggested a massive overhaul of campus governance, university admission standards and school funding that will be debated by university leaders and lawmakers in the upcoming months.
“We want to see some reforms take place in higher education,” Teepell said. “I think they need to be improved, and we want to give them some time to make these reforms.”
Commissioner of Higher Education Sally Clausen had warned lawmakers that colleges were in a crisis and that they had trimmed any fat they could find in the recent rounds of budget cuts.
“The next reduction in higher education will come with much larger consequences,” Clausen recently told the Senate Finance Committee. “The next round will hit core missions.”
Jindal will end months of speculation Friday about where he wants to cut and what he wants to preserve when he presents his budget recommendations on the legal deadline for the governor to submit a spending plan to lawmakers. It is the starting point for budget negotiations that will continue through the three-month legislative session that starts March 29.
The governor’s chief budget architect, Commissioner of Administration Angele Davis, said the proposal will cut state government jobs and “realign the size and scope of government” as the state’s post-hurricane recovery boom subsides. Davis declined to give a price tag for the budget Jindal will propose or specific details about the cuts.
“Our budget is still going to be a very responsible budget. It’s going to be focused on ensuring that we protect and preserve the necessary, critical services in state government,” she said.
Lawmakers have been jittery about what types of cuts they will debate in the session.
“As legislators, I think we are haunted by what we are facing on this coming budget,” said Sen. Sherri Cheek, R-Keithville.
The deepest cuts are expected in health care services, the largest spending area in the budget.
Health and Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine faced a drop of $650 million in federal health care dollars next year, but he said the governor proposes using some of the proceeds from a recent state tax amnesty program and some one-time funding sources to shrink the cuts.
Levine said the governor proposes “modest reductions” to the rates paid to health providers who treat the poor, elderly and disabled in the state Medicaid program, consolidation and privatization of state-run centers for the developmentally disabled, and a reshuffling of state spending on mental health care.
Levine said the recommendations would shift substantial health funding from institutional care to community-based options and less expensive outpatient services. Jindal wants to close 100 inpatient mental health beds and spend those dollars on outpatient services instead, Levine said Thursday.
“There’s ways to reduce expenditures without reducing care. You don’t have to spend all we’re spending,” Levine said.
The LSU-run public hospital system will face cuts, but will get some transitional, one-time funding to carry them through the year while Levine and LSU leaders work on a plan to direct the future of the charity hospitals, Levine said.