SMSU has balanced its budget with plans to reduce operating costs by 10 percent, which is about $200,000 and at least $75,000 in utility budget.

Each of the vice presidents and deans have also worked with their departments to raise additional funding.

“There are multiple departments that are contributing even $1,000 to $2,000 each just to come up with those funds,” Vice President for Finance and Administration Deb Kerkaert said.

Student activity fees have gone up by $.26 a credit; this, included with the $.12 increase in the maintenance/parking fees, means that each student will pay around $10 more a year.  

“We reduced compensation by about $68,000 with some changes that…will be happening before the next fiscal year starts,” Kerkaert said. “All together it was between $700,000 and $800,000 of adjustments between revenues and expenses that we made in order to balance the budget.”

The university’s budget has not been able to keep up with expenses for various reasons.    

“Funding hasn’t kept up [with expenses] partially because of changes in our enrollment mix,” Kerkaert said.  “We have fewer undergraduate students and fewer graduate students on campus, but we have more College Now or the concurrent enrollment students in the high schools.”

The university does not bring in as much revenue with College Now or concurrent enrollment students as it does with undergraduate and graduate students. This means that although enrollment is relatively stable, the amount of money being brought in is less.

“Plus the legislature did not fully fund the request by the system,” Kerkaert said. “At the beginning of this fiscal year, they did not fund $21 million of our total request, so that reduced the amount of funds that we have available.”

For SMSU, that totaled about $600,000 which is close to the amount of the total deficit.

“The system did request that in a supplemental, but neither the House nor the Senate has that much in their bills for a supplemental budget for MnSCU,” Kerkaert said, “so we’re not sure if we’re going to receive any supplemental funding or not.”