CCSN may have had time to avoid cutbacks

Jennifer Knight

Wednesday, April 10, 2002 | 11:04 a.m.

A timeline issued by the Community College of Southern Nevada shows that state university system officials were told as early as October 2000 of a $7.6 million shortfall in the college's 2001-2003 budget, yet the error was not corrected before the Legislature adjourned in June 2001.

Jane Nichols, chancellor of the University and Community College System of Nevada, maintained her office did not know about the mistake until about two months ago.

"What is important here is that now we do know there was an error," Nichols told the Sun. "We did not know at the time (the Legislature was session). But we would have never, in 100 years, known that there was an error and not have corrected it."

Asked if a request by CCSN to correct the error could have slipped through the university system's cracks, Nichols said, "This comes close to a personnel action. It's a tempest in a teapot and we will certainly deal with it."

Determining when the error became known to university system officials is crucial. If a funding disparity had been pointed out in time for a correction to be made before the close of the 2001 Legislative session, CCSN might not have been forced to reduce student services and class offerings, according to school officials.

"Right now what you have is a rough draft of the events that occurred," CCSN President Ron Remington said of the timeline, contained in an internal draft document obtained by the Sun. "It was only intended to instruct me. At the very least I think there was a mistake, and I would like to find out how that misunderstanding occurred."

According to the timeline, three months before the start of the 2001 Legislature, CCSN officials contacted the system's budget office to tell officials that certain classes were mistakenly placed in a "low" funding category when they should have been categorized as "high."

CCSN officials claim that about 43 percent of their classes -- rather than 33 percent -- should have been placed in the highest funding level.

A written account of the error was sent to system officials in January 2001, according to the CCSN document, with a request that the correct amount be reflected in a Legislative Council Bureau report -- a draft of the budget request.

But another issue confronting the system derailed CCSN's efforts to address the $7.6 million shortfall, according to the document's author, Patty Charlton, interim vice president of finance and administration.

New funding formulas created system-wide concerns. Universities felt their classes should have been funded at a higher level, and community colleges had similar complaints. The discrepancies would have cost the state millions to fix. Faced with a poor financial outlook, system officials and lawmakers agreed that the problems would be addressed in committee and revisited during the 2003 legislative session, said Dan Miles, the system's vice president of finance and administration.

The $7.6 million error -- which was separate from the funding formula problems -- was put off too, according to Charlton, so no correction was made.

"At the close of the meeting, I spoke with the system administration budget officer and told him that what had just happened was wrong and that we had been discussing this for months," Charlton said in the draft memo chronicling the events leading up to the funding disparity.

But Nichols said, "We didn't put the issue off. We assumed all of the issue we knew was within the taxonomy issue."

Larry Eardley, the system's budget director, who handled most of the budget issues during the last biennium, did not return repeated phone calls from the Sun.

Miles said he was present during many of those meetings but did not remember any discussion about CCSN having an error.

"I don't recall any of those conversations taking place," Miles said.

Miles has said that the $7.6 million in question probably would not have been funded at 100 percent, but at 81 percent like the rest of the system budget. The amount would have been reduced further due to state estate taxes, had the error been corrected, he said.

Nichols said she cannot comment on CCSN's timeline document.

"This is one employee's version," she said. "I cannot comment on this in the newspaper."

But Nichols added that the communication process most likely broke down last year, when CCSN went into the legislative session with an interim president rather than a permanent one.

"I think it makes a difference when you have a permanent president advocating for you," Nichols said. "Had we had that, this would have never happened."

In another setback for CCSN, Al Ruter, vice president of finance and administration, died last May.

The Sun attempted to contact five of the university system budget officers who were present during some of the early budget talks. Only two returned phone calls.

Carl Diekhans, budget director for Great Basin College in Elko and currently its interim president, backed up CCSN's account of the story.

"That was made known at meetings. I do know that Patty (Charlton) and Al (Ruter) had brought it up," Diekhans said. "I remember Al Ruter telling us that there was an error of about $7 million in the budget. Al had said, before he died, that it needed to be rectified. He said there were some classes (at CCSN) that hadn't been counted. I don't know if UCCSN ever acknowledged that there was an error."

George Scaduto, associate vice president for finance at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said he could not remember any such conversation taking place.