Back on February 19, the Florida Board of Governors (BOG)
approved a proposal to ask the legislature to create a new budget entity for
the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. The plan said that the new budget entity
would “include all operating funds for the Joint College, including the
appropriate amount of plant operation and maintenance funds.”
“The thing that I think President [Elmira Mangum] and I have
both agreed on and certainly with your staff is this, this, these changes,
these changes that we’re talking about, the organizational changes, the
transparency, the accountability, which are all in here, which you all, every
one of you I know believe in, uh, frankly go back to making this a successful
program for the students,” FSU President Thrasher told the BOG at that meeting.
Thrasher also told WCTV-6 that the BOG plan “creates a new
opportunity for governance of the school as well as trying to isolate and put
into a separate fund the resources that we get for the joint college.”
But despite what Thrasher said about “transparency” and
putting “into a separate fund the resources that we get for the joint college,”
millions of dollars that FSU receives for the College of Engineering are not in
the new budget entity.
Documents from the education appropriations subcommittees of the Florida House of Representatives and the Senate show that the only funds that were moved into the new budget entity were the Education & General (E&G) dollars that were previously in the FAMU budget. FSU is still receiving millions for faculty at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering in its separate E&G budget.
Back in 2014, FAMU received a $10.9M appropriation for the
College of Engineering in its general revenue (E&G) budget. That was the
money for maintenance needs, plant operations, and the salaries of 23 FAMU
professors and 27 FSU professors. FSU received a separate appropriation of $5M
in its general revenue (E&G) budget that paid for another 36 FSU professors.
Both chambers of the legislature originally placed an
increased amount of $12.9M for the College of Engineering in the FAMU general
revenue budget at the start of the 2015 session. But in March the education
appropriations subcommittees of the House and Senate moved the $12.9M from the
FAMU general revenue budget to a new budget entity entitled: “FAMU/FSU College
of Engineering.”
Thrasher has not publicly stated that he has any problem
with this. That shows that his demand for “transparency” was not
sincere. There has been no change to add transparency for the engineering
college funds that FSU is receiving in its general revenue appropriation.
This might not be the only surprise that is waiting for FAMU
in the suspicious language on the College of Engineering in the appropriations
bills. The Florida Senate (where Thrasher served last year) has added a budget statement that creates a new Joint College Governance Council for the program.
That Senate language could be used to promote an
interpretation that the Joint College Governance Council will be in charge of
the budget. The Joint College Governance Council is formed in a way that could
let FSU and the BOG chancellor simply vote together in order to make sure that
FSU gets its way on all the big budget decisions.
Thrasher is a smart politician who knows how to use vague
statements in the law to get what he wants. The FAMU administration helped to
create a dangerous and an avoidable situation for the university when it agreed to support the
BOG plan.