The Arizona Board of Regents passed a resolution Thursday afternoon asking the state Legislature for nearly $460 million in increased funding for the 2011 fiscal year.
ASU alone is requesting $176 million to offset earlier budget cuts, to restore buildings on all campuses and to help pay for increasing enrollment.
“More people in Arizona want to be educated at higher and higher levels,” ASU President Michael Crow said in an address to the regents Thursday afternoon. “The University is still growing.”
The presidents of all three Arizona universities spoke at the meeting, advocating for additional funding.
About $42 million would help meet the demands of increased ASU enrollment, if the state approves the request. Other provisions in the resolution would give the University $30 million for a new Tempe campus bookstore and $20 million for renovations to Sun Devil Stadium.
The funding request that passed in Thursday’s ABOR meeting dwarfs the universities’ planned request for an increase of $136 million in state funding for the entire university system. The previous request was listed in the regents’ Thursday meeting agenda, but the actual resolution passed asks the Legislature for an additional $324 million.
University officials said they made the decision to ask for higher increases in funding Thursday morning, after coming to an agreement with regents that the requests they had made in previous years were too low.
The universities make huge cuts to their budgets every year before submitting funding requests, only to have them cut further by the Legislature, ABOR President Ernest Calderón said.
“What we submit every year to the Legislature is a discounted budget,” Calderón said. “It’s not what we truly need, it’s what we think they’ll give us.”
The resolution, which passed 7-3, submits a revised budget which is impractical, said Fred Boice, who was one of three dissenting votes.
“I think going to the Legislature with a $459 million bill, knowing full well they can’t balance their own budget, is inappropriate,” Boice said.
On the legislative side, state Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, said the requests for increased funding are unreasonable in light of the state’s recent budget struggles.
“It’s irresponsible and unrealistic for them to be asking for nearly a half-a-billion-dollar increase in funding,” Kavanagh said. “They should stop playing politics, do what everyone else is doing and tighten their belts.”
Kavanagh added that the maintenance-of-effort provision to receive federal stimulus funding was the only thing preventing the Legislature from making further cuts to the universities last fiscal year. The provision requires states to fund education at levels equal to those in 2006 in order to receive stimulus funding.
“The only reason we will not be cutting them next year is [because of] the terms of the federal stimulus funding,” Kavanagh said. “So they should be happy they’re not getting cut instead of asking for an increase.”
Student Regent Ross Meyer, a student at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, said it is the Board’s responsibility to inform legislators how much funding is required to run an efficient university system — regardless of the state’s current budget shortfall.
“It’s the Legislature’s [choice] to decide what to fund,” Meyer said. “We’re just telling them, ‘This is what it takes to run the universities.’”
Crow said the Legislature needs to consider that state universities are continuing to grow even in the midst of the recession.
“The Legislature has not [told] us to stop enrolling qualified Arizona graduates from high schools — we’re still enrolling them,” Crow said. “The Legislature is not fulfilling its responsibility to support those students.”
Reach the reporter at derek.quizon@asu.edu.
