Cal State Tells Its Campuses to Cut Their Budgets 1%

California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed asked presidents of the university’s 23 campuses Tuesday to cut 1% of their current budgets, a total of about $25 million, because of the state’s troubled economy.

Addressing trustees during a somber meeting at Cal State headquarters in Long Beach, Reed warned that the outlook for California’s largest public university system may get even worse, as it copes with record enrollment and projections that the state will ask for deeper cuts in next year’s budget.

“We’re in the beginning stages of what looks like a pretty significant downturn,” said Reed, who has already asked each campus to impose a partial hiring freeze. “We’re getting ready for bad news.”

At the meeting, however, Reed urged the presidents to do everything possible to keep the cuts from affecting teaching. In a letter to the presidents last week, he had already excluded tenure-track faculty positions from the hiring freeze.

The chancellor said that administrators at each campus will decide how to cut their own budgets and that the reductions will depend on the size of each institution, with the larger campuses, including Cal State Los Angeles and San Jose State, asked to reduce their current budgets by $1.5 million each.

“We want to do everything we can not to affect the instructional side of the program,” Reed said after the budget session, which came on the first day of the trustees’ regular two-day meeting.

“But they’ll have to look at everything from holding some [staff and administration] positions vacant to canceling travel to putting off purchases and spreading out maintenance over time,” he said.

Ultimately, he said, the campuses may also have to consider cutting temporary faculty posts, an issue bound to inflame the chancellor’s already rocky relations with the Cal State faculty.

Faculty union leaders say members are to rally outside the trustees’ meeting today to protest what they see as the administration’s uncompromising stance in negotiations and a consequent erosion in education. In its most recent budget request, forwarded to the governor’s office last week, Cal State requested a 4% salary increase for its 42,000 faculty and staff. The faculty has sought a pay hike of 6.3%.

Reed said Tuesday that the requested cuts will be difficult as the system struggles to cope with record numbers of students. Enrollment soared 5.5% this year, to 388,734, or 8,200 more than expected.

Gov. Gray Davis recently asked all state agencies to cut back and to prepare for cuts of up to 15% in next year’s budgets. The University of California Board of Regents is set to take up the matter at its meeting this week in San Francisco.

At several Cal State campuses, meanwhile, officials Tuesday said they were just beginning to digest the news of the immediate 1% cuts. But several said they hoped to be able to make the needed reductions through the hiring freeze and minor belt-tightening in all departments.

“We’re not anticipating any operational difficulties immediately,” said Steven Garcia, vice president for administration and finance at Cal State L.A. “Annually, we budget for a reserve, so we’re hoping we’ll be all right.”

For next year, however, with the state’s budget shortfall anticipated to mean cuts of 5% to 15% across the system, the concerns are considerably greater, Garcia said. “We can do 1% or 2% without too much negative impact, but 5% or 10% would be a whole different matter,” he said.

At Cal State Northridge, spokesman John Chandler said the campus should be able to escape relatively unscathed from the current cuts by drawing on its budgeted reserve. Dipping into the reserve funds is not unusual, he said, but “We don’t typically expend the entire reserve in a given year.”

Reed said the situation will be much more dire, though, if the predictions for next year are accurate. Among the measures that might have to be considered at that point would be raising student fees, which were lowered in the early 1990s and have not been increased in seven years.

“We may have to put everything on the table, including fee increases,” he said. “All we know now is that it’s going to be bad, and we’re preparing for hard times. But I’m afraid we don’t even know the worst yet.”

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Times staff writer Zanto Peabody contributed to this report.