EMTC budget gap may force staff cuts Utility costs cited in $230,000 shortfall

BANGOR – Less than three weeks into its new financial year, Eastern Maine Technical College finds itself in a quarter-million dollar hole, with its president looking to cut at least one faculty position to help fill the gap and warning that more personnel cuts could be forthcoming.

Joyce Hedlund, the college’s president, announced the shortfall to EMTC staff members in a memo sent out last week. On Wednesday, she confirmed the news for the Bangor Daily News, saying that higher utility costs, the cafeteria budget, insurance rates and other “foundational costs” caused three-quarters of the shortfall.

She is looking to reorganize and cut an instructor from the automotive technology program, which has been “struggling” with enrollment, Hedlund said.

But in the memo, she warned staff members that further, non-faculty personnel cuts could be in the works.

While the memo cites a $285,000 gap, Hedlund said Wednesday that it had been recalculated and shaved to $230,000, equal to 2.6 percent of the school’s $8.8 million budget.

The memo was “to give a heads up” to staff members that administrators were looking at all aspects of the college’s budget to find ways to close the gap, Hedlund explained. “Staff and faculty need to know what administrators are working on.”

However, dealing with this size shortfall “is not going to be devastating for the school.”

Given that state lawmakers last month finally approved a 4 percent increase in state aid to the technical college system, Hedlund said, “We expected some kind of deficit.”

Don Hansen, a machine tool technology instructor at EMTC and until recently president of the statewide faculty union at the technical colleges, said that the shortfall has been caused by the failure of state funding to keep pace with expanding enrollment caused by the new associate of arts degree.

State aid covers about half the costs of each new student. If aid doesn’t keep pace with head count, he said, “when you add you kill yourself. They want us to expand, but the funding isn’t there.”

Total head count enrollment has increased on average 5 percent each year for the past five years at EMTC. During the same period, the number of degree-seeking students, who tend to have heavier demands on the school’s services, has risen 9.9 percent on average each year.

However, Hedlund disagreed with Hansen, saying the associate of arts degree has helped fill vacant slots in liberal arts programs.

Hansen agreed with Hedlund on the utility rate factor.

“Electricity is a huge amount of the budget,” he said.

Programs like machine tool technology and welding consume large amounts of power.

Hedlund also noted that the school’s energy bill has gone up as EMTC has converted its boilers from using No. 4 fuel oil to the more expensive No. 2 as a way to cut pollution.

But because of falling enrollment, it is the automotive technology program that is being asked to overhaul and fine-tune itself.

Hedlund said that enrollment in the program is down from 35 students just a few years ago to 20 currently.

When asked if other schools in the technical college system could also be facing budget shortfalls, Alice Kirkpatrick, the system’s spokeswoman, said that it was too early to tell.

Summer is the time when the colleges see how their budgets “settle out” as enrollment projections become firmer, she said.

But it’s been known that budgets could be tight with the state providing just a 4 percent funding raise for the upcoming school year, and helping with “some but not all” of the system’s salary increases, she said.