On August 28, Southern Oregon University presented an updated budget to its Board of Trustees. Since the Board approved the budget in June, the university noticed some errors and made a variety of updates to it. This comes shortly after SOU made cuts across the university to avoid a forecasted budget shortfall. JPR's Jane Vaughan spoke with SOU President Rick Bailey about the university's financial situation and the expected changes.
Jane Vaughan: You presented to SOU's Board of Trustees on August 28 about some important updates to the university's fiscal year 2024 budget, which was approved back in June. And they're not all negative. So for example, the university is receiving more funding from the state than expected. But also there were some flaws, like one reduction being counted twice. And you had said these errors stemmed from the budget director being on leave. Can you explain how that led to these errors?
Rick Bailey: Yeah, that's a good question, Jane. So ultimately, in any budget process, there are variables that are beyond our control. But then there are some things that are within our control. And my focus was, what are those things that we can control? And how do we do those things better? What the board made a decision on at our meeting this week was really not too far off from the budget they approved in June. It was about, probably represented about 1% of our overall budget. The issue, though, is that those swings that you just mentioned in your question, some positive, some negative, were really big swings. It just resulted in something that was actually fairly small.
JV: How and when did you realize these errors in the budget? When were they brought to your attention?
RB: This came to me probably in, I'm gonna say it was probably the first part of July to mid July. And as we started to explore more, because the first issue had to do with this potential error in terms of how we potentially double counted some savings from the SOU Forward plan, but actually that led to an exploration that revealed, oh, here's some assumptions actually, that we should have done better on, and here's some things that were left out that we really need to focus on. Hey, how do we really explore vacancy, there are so many different variables that enough of that led me to say, this is bigger now than a simple error. When there are enough of those things, it really does necessitate, this is now ripe for process improvement, and we really need to overhaul this.
JV: So there was a lot that was talked about in the presentation that was given at the Board of Trustees meeting. Can you briefly summarize the changes that have been made to the budget?
RB: Sure. So on the positive side, I think the biggest impact came from the fact that the state legislature, in their final budget, gave the public university support fund a lot more funding. On the negative side, it is things that we either made an error on, things that we made an assumption that should have been double checked, things where we didn't account for, here's what we project our negotiations with our union partners are going to be, so those are things that we could have fixed. Taxpayers deserve that from us, our students definitely deserve that from us, our employees, whose livelihoods are dependent on it, all of that is a reason for us to make sure that we're doing the best we can.
JV: So you mentioned faculty, staff, students, what sort of impacts might they see from these budget changes?
RB: Very little. So that's the good news.
JV: Is there anything in particular that you learned in terms of how to improve this process going forward?
RB: Absolutely. So in terms of the things that we can control, we didn't have in our process enough resiliency and redundancy built into it. So in other words, we all make mistakes. But are there ways for us to improve the process where you know what, there's going to be a few more people who are double checking this. In any strategic endeavor, there are ways in which you can improve processes just so that we can help each other out and have each other's back and catch errors and other things.
JV: Okay, great. So we're heading into a new school year. Big picture, how are things looking for SOU financially?
RB: Really good. I do see the world through rose colored glasses, I completely admit that. But if I look at where we are now to where we were a year ago, night and day difference. I am so optimistic about where we are headed. We're not sitting on a pile of cash either. So let me be clear about that. But I do think that our trajectory is in the right direction. I think we are building a foundation and guiding principles that are going to sustain the fiscal health of our institution long term. Early indications for fall enrollment are crazy good. So all of those things are positive.
JV: Okay, great. Well, thanks so much.
RB: Thanks, Jane.
