Interim Report on the Proposed All-Funds Budgeting Process

Background

In fulfillment of our standing charge to consider matters related to budget and planning, the NBFC Budget and Planning Committee has given preliminary consideration to the Preliminary Report of the All-Funds Budgeting Task Force, kindly supplied by Executive Vice-President Furmanski.  We are continuing our consideration of the Preliminary Report and will consider any subsequent recommendations from the Task Force. In addition, we plan to consider a number of the items in the charge to the Task Force that that body was unable to consider in the time allotted for its deliberations. At this time, however, we would like to report on our preliminary assessment of the recommendations of the Task Force and to offer two recommendations to Vice-President Furmanski.

The Budget and Planning Committee appreciates the opportunity to review the preliminary report of the Task Force.  We agree, in general, with the proposed basic principles to guide the budget process and with the general outline of the proposed process, especially its “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” nature.  We have, however, serious concerns regarding two aspects of the proposed budgeting process and timetable.

First of all, we do not believe that the budget process proposed by the Task Force provides for appropriate faculty input. Basic principle 10 of the Preliminary Report states: “Allocation discussions should be made with appropriate faculty consultation. The form may vary according to the practices and cultures of the various units.”  However, the only formal faculty input to the proposed budget process is at the departmental level.  The faculty play the central role in the educational, research, and service missions of the University and we believe the faculty input at all levels will improve the budgeting process by providing a valuable resource to aid Deans, Provosts, the EVPAA and the President in setting priorities and in assessing the extent to which the previous year’s budget allocations supported the drive toward the next level of excellence. Hence we offer the following recommendation.

Recommendations

Recommendation 1

We recommend that there be formal faculty advisory input at each level of the All-Funds Budget Process.  Specifically we recommend that
 
(i) there be an elected faculty budget advisory committee in each decanal unit, with responsibilities that include reporting yearly to the faculty in the relevant unit.

(ii) there be a campus-wide faculty advisory committee on each campus to provide budgetary advice to the Provost or EVPAA.  In New Brunswick, we recommend that the NBFC Budget and Planning Committee play this role.

(iii) there be a university-wide budget advisory committee of distinguished senior faculty members to provide advice to the President on budgetary matters.

(iv) that each of these budget advisory committees participate in budgetary planning for the next fiscal year and in reviewing budgetary performance in the previous year.

The Budget and Planning Committee also has a concern regarding the tentative timetable the Task Force proposed for the All-Funds Budgeting Process.  This timetable interleaves the Rutgers internal budget process with the steps that the University must take to interface with the State budget process.  The State requires that the University submit a tentative budget to the Governor's office in December. However, the proposed University process, according to the tentative timetable, would require Deans and Administrative Unit Heads to meet with Provosts and the Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs in December/January to review the prior year's budget and the coming year's budget requests, with the Provosts and Executive Vice President deciding on provisional allocations for the next fiscal year in February.  This all happens far too late to inform the University's budget request to the Governor. In contrast, if these two last steps in the proposed University process were scheduled so that preliminary budget decisions could be concluded by December, it would provide time for the decisions to have an impact on the University's budget request.  Clearly this would result in the University's budget request being more closely tied to the University's priorities as set by the All-Funds Budgeting process.  Further, it would provide better leverage in negotiations with the Governor and Legislature, in that the more detailed we can make the budget request, the more detailed we can be about the impact that insufficient funding will have on our academic, research, and service missions.  We therefore make the following recommendation.

Recommendation 2

We recommend that the proposed timetable for the All-Funds Budget Process be accelerated so that review of the previous year’s budget, setting of budget priorities, and decisions concerning provisional budget allocations would be completed in December in order to have optimal impact on the University’s budget request to the Governor.

The Faculty Council endorsed the recommendations in this interim report on February 27, 2004.