Chuck Whitten of KNCO NewsTalk 830 did a story on the Sierra College budget challenges. They helpfully post their radio pieces on the web in written format, so I thought I’d share it here.

The Sierra Community College District Board of Trustees has heard public comment on proposed cuts in district jobs, salaries, programs and services. The board needs to cut ten-point-seven million dollars from the budget for the fiscal year that begins July first. The proposed cuts include a five percent across the board salary cut, six unpaid furlough days for non-teaching staff, elimination of 35 jobs, elimination of six sports, and elimination of three programs. District Board Member, Aaron Klein, says the board questions the choice of programs to be eliminated, "The issue that the board had on this past Tuesday evening was, we don’t quite understand why the three programs that were slated for closure, construction, agriculture, and automotive technology are the correct choices."

Klein says the board has sixty days before it has to make a decision. He says the board has asked the administration to take another look at the proposed program cuts, "What we requested of our staff was to go and review our options and come back to us with alternatives, different cuts, maybe private industry support for those programs, and find a way that we could potentially save those programs, or at the very least, keep them in some kind of skeletal form, so that we can bring them back when better fiscal times come back to our budget."

Klein says a crowd of several hundred people showed up at Tuesday’s board meeting, and about 85 of those expressed their concerns to board members. He says he’s worried that this is not the end of cuts for community colleges in California, especially since the state is facing a 20-billion dollar shortfall going into budget negotiations for the coming year.