Budget Process Team Seeks Big Change

By Isaac Graham · The Mainstream
Published Janurary 24, 2012

UCC has a New Year’s resolution of its own: a more transparent budget process.

A new committee, the budget process team, has been working since October 2011 to increase personal and institutional knowledge about the college’s budget process. This team was spearheaded by Lynn Moore, vice president of student services.

“My number one goal when I came into this position in September was to create a budget process team,” said Moore.

The team’s charges are to increase institutional budget process knowledge, to help manage the current budget and to help develop next year’s budget. Although the team has no decision-making authority, one of its major goals is to help manage UCC’s current resources. This goal was partly what led Moore to develop the team. “We have a lot of people with great ideas,” she said. “Why don’t we use that?”

In order to do this, team members are currently educating themselves in order to act as budget advisers.

Some of the team’s recommendations have already been put into effect. One such recommendation was for the instructional leadership team to sit down and look at each other’s individual budgets. The hope is that this transparency will allow all departments to re-align expenditures to get the most out of available resources.

Although cuts are always a concern in an economic downturn, Moore says, “We are looking at leveraging or re-aligning more than cutting.”

The budget process team -- Lynn Moore, Rebecca Redell, Bill Armstrong, Bettie Wright, Chris Morgan, Judy Ode, Robin VanWinkle and Brenna Martin—has also started holding joint meetings with the campus internal budget committee which includes members such as Dee Winn, Crystal Sullivan, Teri Wichman and Carol Longacre.