AIDAN POLLARD
News Editor
Right before the beginning of the spring semester, Interim President Hefner sent out an email to the Fredonia faculty and staff. The email contained remarks on the successes of the fall and plans moving forward. It also included a detailed look at the 2020-2021 budget.
The email outlined a six-part explanation of the budget, including state funding and tuition, baseline revenue additions, baseline cuts, structural deficit reduction, “closing the gap” with one-time funds and a plan to rid the school of its structural deficit by 2024.
But in an interview with The Leader, Hefner consolidated the budget into a shorter, more digestible three-point plan.
Dr. Hefner’s four-year “correction pathway”:
1. Increase enrollment:
“It’s very understandable how the campus got in this situation,” said Hefner. “With the number of students that are graduating from high schools in Western New York dropping dramatically, that has been the primary reason for shrinking our enrollment.”
Part of the plan to increase enrollment is the Pennsylvania-Ohio Initiative, in which students from those states will be offered more competitively-priced tuition at Fredonia.
2. Budget cuts:
There was a $150,000 budget cut over this past summer. An additional $900,000 baseline budget cut is planned for 2020, plus a cut of $200,000 from scholarships to be repeated annually.
[RELATED: Fredonia’s budget crisis: Fact or Fiction?]
3. Increase lobbying:
“We’re going to be very aggressive in our lobbying with the legislature to make sure that we don’t go backwards,” said Hefner.
Exactly what that entails is vague, but the state is no longer funding collective bargaining. It caused the budget to take a hit of $1.6 million.
Though, Hefner has a record as a strong bargainer who makes candies for state officials to help get his foot in the door.
