CONWAY — CONWAY - Less than two years after a vendor’s contract offer shrouded in secrecy led to the resignation of University of Central Arkansas President Allen Meadors, another vendor deal is being negotiated - this time far more openly.
The transparency surrounding a proposed 10-year pact with Coca-Cola has allowed for vigorous debate.
Shortly after UCA President Tom Courtway listened to tough questions and complaints from some faculty senators last week about a proverbial clash between athletic and academic spending, faculty senate President Kevin Browne expressed hisgratitude to Courtway.
In an e-mail to Courtway, with others including the news media copied, Browne wrote, “Thank you for your appearance today, your candor, and your consistent willingness to share information and exchange views with us. We may disagree on some things (sometimes passionately), but the two big stories are:
“1. How far we’ve come in the last five years, and especially in the last several months.
“How open and robust our shared governance is.”
Indeed, Don Bradley, an outspoken critic of the spending divide and a member of the committee that reviewed competing proposals fromCoca-Cola and Pepsi, said everything about the subject has been “above the board.”
Bradley said, “This has been the most fair and honest” and open vendor discussion in UCA’s history to his knowledge.
The Meadors dispute related to a $700,000 offer by food vendor Aramark to renovate the UCA-owned president’s house. Trustees declined the offer after they learned that neither Meadors nor former board Chairman Scott Roussel had told them it was tied to a seven-year contract extension.
Meadors resigned Sept. 2, 2011, just more than three years after Lu Hardin resigned from the UCA presidency inAugust 2008.
Several faculty members have said they feel freer to express their opinions publicly under Courtway than they did under Meadors.
While welcome by many, that openness has led to plenty of public debate since Courtway took over - in this case about how UCA will divvy up an estimated $213,000 of potential annual revenue from Coca-Cola.
Courtway stressed repeatedly that no decision has been made on how to allocate the soft-drink revenue, including a $100,000 signing bonus that Coca-Cola is offering.
“There’s no under-thetable plan,” he said.
By comparison, Courtway said, Pepsi’s contract, which expires May 30, has provided about $120,000 annually in auxiliary revenue. Of that sum, UCA has been giving $70,000 to athletics, $25,000 to the student center and $25,000 to housing.
If this $120,000 split continues under the new agreement, he said, that would leave $93,000 in additional annual revenue from Coca-Cola.
Some faculty senators were particularly concerned that UCA’s revenue from Coca-Cola would go to help pay off roughly $1.5 million of a debt created in 2011 by construction of a weighttraining facility for student athletes. An unidentified donor who had planned to pay $1 million toward that facility never came through with the money, Courtwaysaid.
Bradley, who has previously criticized bonuses and raises given to some coaches but not to professors, strongly questioned athletic spending last week.
“Who paid for the athletic offices underneath the skyboxes?” Bradley asked. “When’s the last time that we had a lot of money that came out of the foundation” for academics?
Courtway said he would like to make “some or all of that $93,000, maybe even more,” go toward faculty matters.
“Clearly, I want to try to do something for the academics and the students,” he added.
When Courtway said the athletic department was financing some expenses from its own budget, Bradley countered, “The athletic department gets 5 percent override out of housing” revenue. “The athletic department pays for that? Or did the housing people pay for that?”
Housing revenue that went to athletics could have gone to make housing renovations or to lower student-housing costs, Bradley said.
“At a time when all this money is going to athletics, we’re not getting [any of it] on the academic side,” Bradley said.
Courtway said in a brief interview Friday that he thought it was “a laudable goal” to designate some auxiliary revenues to academics. Whether they go to faculty development, research or equipment, he said, it’s good “to the extent that I can do it.”
During the faculty-senate meeting, Courtway noted, however, that “We are talking auxiliary revenues, not [educational and general revenues] flowing into the [educational-and-general] side of the budget.
“Generally, there’s almost a wall between auxiliary [revenues] ... and academics,” he said.
Indeed, a review of auxiliary uses by Arkansas’ fouryear public universities reflected such is the case at most of the schools.
UCA said it transferred $387,000 in auxiliary revenue to educational-and-general funds in fiscal 2012 and $668,750.28 in fiscal 2013 as of Thursday.
But some of those uses are not what most people would consider academic uses, Courtway noted.
For example, $255,000 of auxiliary revenue last year and again this year is budgeted for the Reynolds Performance Hall, which isconsidered part of educational-and-general.
Not one of Arkansas’ other four-year public universities except for the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville indicated it transferred any auxiliary revenue to academics during the past or current fiscal year.
UA-Fayetteville spokesman Steve Voorhies said in an e-mail that its athletics department “transfers funds to meet all identifiable costs to the campus,” such as tuition, fee, housing and dining costs, utilities and facilities maintenance “and then provides $1,841,000 annually to support debt service on a major Educational and General building and other campus programs.”
By fiscal 2015, he said, the athletic department will have committed to an additional sum of $1,250,000 annually.
Voorhies also said, “There are no [fiscal 2013 auxiliary] transfers to athletics to date nor are any expected.”
Courtway said he plans to brief the UCA board of trustees on the soft-drink proposal at a meeting Friday but said the board won’t vote on it until May because “we’re still working out the contract.”
Courtway also reminded faculty senators of how much progress UCA has made financially in recent years. When Hardin left the school, it was deeply in debt.
UCA is now looking at “healthy fund balances” in June. “We came out of the hole financially,” he said, despite no additional state funding help, even as enrollment declined.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 02/17/2013