A proposed new budgeting process for Ohio University is designed to decentralize budget decisions, place more responsibility and accountability on individual academic areas at OU and provide a tool for leaders in making budget decisions, the details of which were discussed at an open forum yesterday.
(The new budgeting process) is a tool
said Phyllis Bernt, co-chair of the resource implementation team. It will help the university get where it wants to go. This is not a substitution for good leadership in making decisions. It is just a model.
This model, to be enacted through Vision Ohio, OU's comprehensive plan for the future, will create a budget based on activity within university colleges and departments as a whole rather than just making annual adjustments for inflation and deflation, the primary method for the incremental budget process the university now uses, Bernt said. The current process shows no correlation with the activity level of the college she said. A drawback to this system is that it is not nimble enough to include activity within the college such as increased enrollment, a factor in the proposed budget model.
One of the major concerns about the responsibility-centered budget model was how the university would decide to cut funds in academic areas.
The new budgeting process will not be the deciding factor in these decisions, Bernt said, adding that discussions among OU President Roderick McDavis, OU Provost Kathy Krendl and college deans will be what determine cuts or reallocations of funds.
There is no way this model will decide Bernt said. It is a tool for academic leadership to use to decide.
Another concern raised was how to enforce accountability among academic areas once the new, decentralized budget model is instituted.
The different academic units are not trying to create profit centers
but to run a quality institution
Bernt said, adding that college deans will still be required to meet with Krendl annually as an accountability mechanism.
Because the new budgeting process decides annual allocations based on revenues generated by OU's colleges, some attendees were concerned about colleges or academic units that generate less revenue than others.
If an academic unit finds that its budget is insufficient, they can make a well-researched case to Krendl to lobby for more funds, Bernt said.
Vision Ohio's Resource Implementation Team will be working under an ambitious schedule over the next three years, Bernt said, a timeline she said she hopes the team maintains.
From last quarter to the present, the team has been in the research phase of progress, examining the budgeting processes from other universities such as the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, Indiana University and the University of New Hampshire, Bernt said.
Policy and procedure of the new budget will be formed this quarter through the beginning of Spring Quarter, and the new budget will go into the implementation process from the middle of Spring Quarter through the summer, she said.
During the second year of the budget process, the 2006-07 academic year, OU will be running on parallel budgets, where both the incremental and responsibility-centered budget models will be enacted to examine the difference. In the third year of the process, the 2007-08 academic year, Bernt said she hopes the university will go live with the system.
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