Community College Gets One-Time Appropriation

NorthWest Arkansas Community College and Pulaski Technical College each received $750,000 in one-time appropriations out of the state General Improvement Fund, three times as much as other state two-year colleges, according to final budget legislation.

The money is no windfall, said Rep. Duncan Baird, R-Lowell. Baird is the House chairman of the Joint Budget Committee. State appropriations never kept up with the fast-growing enrollments at either school, Baird said. The lag has grown to the point each school now receives about half the state money per student as the average among the state’s 22 two-year colleges.

“In fact, it wasn’t even half before,” Baird said. “We got it up to 50 percent just this session.”

The decision to grant those two schools three times the $250,000 allotted to each of the other two-year institutions was a compromise while the Legislature continues to look for a solution to a higher education spending pattern that doesn’t take growth adequately into account, he said. NWACC has a yearly budget of $39 million.

Northwest Arkansas is now in a much better position to make sure the problem with lagging state support for NWACC and others gets fixed, Baird said. “We’re the stronghold of the Republican Party, which used to be the minority party,” he said. “There were 28 Republicans in the House when I went in.” Now there are 51 Republican members of the 100-member House. Problems like the funding lag at at the college will get year-in, year-out emphasis it has never received before, he said.

Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, said he hopes Baird’s prediction proves true “for NWACC and for the University of Arkansas, which also has a phenomenal growth rate that leaves its state funding further and further behind. The ultimate example, though, is the Northwest campus of UAMS.” State money for the Fayetteville campus of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences “has stayed flat since it opened.”

The Republican-majority Northwest Arkansas delegation has made common cause with Northwest Arkansas Democrats on college appropriations and other issues, Baird said. Rep. Greg Leding, D-Fayetteville, agreed the “corner caucus” found it could work together on regional issues, citing key Republican support on energy and conservation bills he sponsored. Leding is House Minority Leader for the Democrats.

Rep. Micah Neal, R-Springdale, said regional co-operation was helped greatly by the attitude of Democrats Lindsey, Leding, David Whitaker of Fayetteville and others who have shown great willingness to work together: “Greg had a bill in committee that I was against, and he won. He could have just gone on to the House floor and the Senate and passed it, but he met with me, talked to me about my concerns and fixed it. He didn’t have to do that.”

Not all the alliances he formed came as naturally as that agreement with Neal, Leding said. “I found myself working with some unusual allies,” Leding said. Those included Sen. Jason Rapert, a Republican from central Arkansas best known for his strong anti-abortion legislation. Leding, who sits on the House Public Health Committee, fought Rapert on those bills but later found him willing to be lead Senate sponsor on an energy bill of Leding’s.

“Nothing, though, mattered as much to this region as passing the plan on Medicaid,” Leding said. The “private option” plan to use federal Medicaid taxpayer money to help pay insurance premiums for the working poor was vital for the region, which has a high proportion of the state’s uninsured and largest number of children living in poverty, he said.

The vote to do that split the Northwest Arkansas Republican delegation, which is to be expected, Baird said. “When you’re a small group on a minority party, you almost have to stick together to get anything done,” Baird said. “When you’re in the majority, it’s not that way.”

Leding agreed, and joked at the Republicans: “They’re finding out what it’s like to be us, at least a little bit. We’re a big group of people and it can be hard to get us all to agree.”

The bill passed because some Republicans were willing to vote for it — but more important, because of an almost unheard-of degree of solidarity among Democrats, Lindsey said. “I don’t think the importance of that got the attention it deserved,” Lindsey said. “We didn’t lose a vote among 48 House members and 14 Senators.”

Fayetteville residents in particular will have lasting distress over voter identification, changes to state elections and the weakening of environmental laws, Lindsey said.

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