The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s chief fundraising arm was able to get a half-million dollars’worth of help with its $13.3 million budget for the currentfiscal year by shifting some costs to eight university colleges and other outside units that historically have partnered to fund certain positions, officials confirmed.
Six academic colleges, the athletic department and the Division of Student Affairs agreed to take on a greater share of paying for 16 positions for a combined contribution of $505,137 toward the Advancement Division’s fiscal 2014 budget, which took effect July 1, said Chris Wyrick, vice chancellor for the Division of University Advancement.
On a videotaped talk June 20 about his restructuring of the Advancement Division, Wyrick told members of his staff that they should thank the deans and other administrators for their help.
After the close of fiscal2012, UA administrators learned that the Advancement Division had accumulated a multimillion-dollar deficit because of overspending. A report about the deficit attributed this to the former division’s chief increasing staff without requesting the funds to do so, and mistakes in budget management and forecasting revenue.
The university has estimated that the division’s deficit was $3.37 million in fiscal 2012 alone, roughly a third of the unit’s $10 million budget. But university records also indicate that the 2012 deficit could have reached as high as $4.34 million. An audit of its finances by state legislative auditors is expected to be released this week.
No cuts in teaching, research or service should have resulted from the other units assuming responsibility for funding the shared positions, Provost Sharon Gaber wrote in an email.
“I do not believe that funding for these positions came from state funds,” Gaber continued. “It is my understanding that private dollars have been used to pay for thesepreviously split positions.”
The university’s College of Engineering absorbed the most positions and the most expense into its budget - four positions and $209,158, according to a list Wyrick provided.
Engineering Dean John English didn’t return a call to his office Thursday or an email Friday. The college’s spokesman, Camilla Medders, said English was out of town and tied up in meetings.
The other academic colleges affected were: the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, three positions, $74,952; College of Education and Health Professions, three positions, $74,270; Sam M. Walton College of Business, two positions, $29,831; Fay Jones School of Architecture, one position, $21,028; and the University of Arkansas School of Law, one position, $26,374.
The law school was able to absorb the full salary for the position without affecting students, and no money was moved from academic programs, Dean Stacy Leeds wrote in an email Friday.
Students benefit from the employee’s work, Leeds wrote. “In addition to fundraising responsibilities, this person works with alumni incentral Arkansas and is integral to our ability to connect students with lawyers for potential job opportunities during law school and after graduation,” she wrote.
The other two units were the Student Affairs Division, one position, $13,237, and the UA athletic department, one position, $56,287, Wyrick said.
Historically, UA athletics has operated off its own revenue generated from sporting events, particularly football and men’s basketball, and has not used taxpayer or student dollars.
“We had a shared position with advancement that worked for the university and for Athletics,” said Kevin Trainor, the chief spokesman for the athletic department and the Razorbacks.
“It had been split 50-50, but now athletics is paying 100 percent of salary and benefits for that position,” said Trainor, associate athletic director for public relations.
The position is a development officer - the university’s description for a fundraiser - who worked for both advancement’s Development Office and as an athletics development officer, Trainor said. He said he believed $56,287 reflects half of the salary and benefits thatfund the position.
The university has long had a complex cost-sharing system in which some positions - particularly Development Office fundraisers and University Relations communications personnel stationed in the colleges - have their salaries and benefits paid by two different units, typically the college or department where they’re stationed and the pertinent unit within Advancement.
The ratios of the cost-sharing varied, Wyrick said. During the previous capital campaign - which raised $1.046 billion between July 1, 1998, and June 30, 2005 - a unit might have more than one cost-shared employee, but its senior employee’s cost split was 50-50.
University officials later discovered that during Wyrick’s predecessor’s time there, the 50-50 split wasn’t being consistently adhered to for some reason. Wyrick, Chancellor G. David Gearhart, Provost Gaber and UA’s finance chief Don Pederson decided the university needed to return to this model, Wyrick said, so they talked to the deans and others and agreed to the changes for fiscal 2014.
The cost-sharing is complex, Wyrick said, in that some of the shared positions report dually to the two units and some do not, and in some cases a different unit evaluates and approves raises for the employee than the unit that pays the employee’s salary.
A Nov. 19, 2012, worksheet illustrates some of the cost splits as ranging from as low as a 30-70 split, to 50-50, to some as high as 100 percent, though it is not clear whether it reflects the situation at that point in time or future plans. Gaber said Friday the document “identifies the splits and what would be taken over by the colleges/units.”
In January, Gearhart wrote the deans that he had no plans for layoffs to help balance the Advancement budget and that he wouldn’t implement an earlier revenue idea - an assessment fee against private donations during fiscal 2013.
Dean Tom Smith of UA’s College of Education and Health Professions told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette at the time that he was “very glad” the assessment had been put on hold. Smith was among those who didn’t return phone calls this week regarding the cost-sharing.
On July 25, university administrators said they hadbalanced the fiscal 2013 budget for the deficit-troubled Advancement Division, ending with $13.37 million in expenditures, and had approved a similar amount of $13.3 million for the fiscal 2014 budget, which began July 1.
However, the university still hasn’t provided full details of how the fiscal 2013 budget was balanced, nor how it was able to increase the current fiscal 2014 budget.
The Democrat-Gazette filed a Freedom of Information Act request July 12 that sought budget details for the two years among records related to the organizational restructuring of Advancement announced in a news release July 11.
The university supplied draft versions of the fiscal 2013 and fiscal 2014 budgets on July 16. The university also released some salary information related to the Advancement Division restructuring and its promotion of 11 employees, and Wyrick explained some examples of budget-cutting measures in a July 15 interview.
UA later provided two pages of budget information that provide an incomplete picture of budgets for fiscal 2013 and 2014.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/08/2013