Legislators restore university budget

Legislators restore university budget

By Tyler Dixon

 

State officials decided to keep the university’s funding equal to the last fiscal year after a legislative session Friday.

The session, between Illinois Congress and House representatives, allowed the university to regain their original budget for the fiscal year, despite Governor Pat Quinn’s plans to cut funding to higher education budget by 5 percent. The cut would have decreased the SIU budget by $11 million, from last year’s $203 million to around $192 million.

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Since the state agreed to keep the university’s budget at $203 million, individual schools of study were able to have their funding restored, SIU President Glenn Poshard.

He said the School of Pharmacy and the Simmon’s Cancer Institute in the School of Medicine received about $1.2 million each.

The university was also able to re-appropriate about $78 million for renovations and repair projects at SIU’s Carbondale and Edwardsville campuses.

The Carbondale campus re-appropriated $16.5 million to Morris Library, $4.2 million to the Communications Building, $4.3 million to the Transportation Education Center and $7.4 million to the maintenance department, Poshard said in an email.

He said the restored budget will help keep tuition and fees low and allow the university to remain affordable.

“The university is moving in the right direction and I see hundreds of positive things on campus everyday,” Poshard said.

While the university’s budget was determined at Friday’s session, the governor and legislators have yet to resolve the pension reform problem.

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Gov. Quinn said Tuesday he may call a special session to discuss pension reform, but legislators would have to set aside their differences first.

Chris Mooney, a political science professor at the University of Illinois Springfield, said in an Associated Press article that calling a special session could be a bad idea if a resolution can’t be found.

“If the governor calls a special session without a deal being made, it’s just going to be more embarrassment,” Mooney said in the article.

According to the same article, Illinois’ five public employee retirement systems are less than $100 billion short of what is needed to pay benefits.

As the Illinois Congress and House struggled to cooperate during the last legislative session, Sen. Matt Murphy said leadership is an issue.

“There couldn’t be a more stunning indictment of your failure of leadership than this right here,” Murphy said.

The pension reform problems have caused concern for some state officials, like Sen. Dan Duffy.

“It should be a top priority before we do anything else. Everyone’s losing out,” Duffy said.

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