We had a busy board meeting this past Tuesday evening, with a variety of important items, including the budget, the solar project and investing in institutional development.

I’m on the road today and running 90mph, so this will have to be brief.

Suffice it to say: we got way lucky with property tax collections for 2009-10 and ended up having a much smaller deficit than we thought we’d have. Our revenue is still down $5.6MM from where it was, but thanks to the sacrifices of our staff, our expenses are in line with our revenues.

The key question ahead is: are we facing more cuts in 2010-11 when the state finally passes its budget? Or with tax collections actually inching up in California, have we passed the worst of this crisis and things are going to slowly grow back toward the “old normal?”

Either way, we’ll know a lot more in January, and it’s my opinion that we will need to put a decent amount of our reserves to work in the second half of this fiscal year – either covering the impact of state cuts, or hopefully, investing in our institution, increasing access to college and giving our staff the safe and effective facilities they have consistently told us they need.

Reserves are there as an insurance policy to keep our students in their classes and our employees in their jobs. As soon as it becomes clear that we’ve turned the corner, it’s clearly the right decision to put those funds to work achieving our core mission.

» Review the Budget Presentation

We had a long discussion about investing in institutional development. I want to see us put our money where our mouths are, and if we truly want to see dramatic improvement in our capital facilities, we need to develop new ways to fund them. I hope the faculty leadership will partner with the board, because we have deeply shared interests in a positive outcome on this front.

And finally, the solar project. A year in the making and I’m so excited about this development. Fully 68% of our entire college energy usage will go off the grid in 12 months when this solar array goes live. The college will save some $3MM in energy costs over the next 25 years. And all of this while a private company puts up 100% of the capital to build the array and creates jobs in the process!

» Review the Solar Presentation

All in all, it was a great board meeting. We have plenty of challenges ahead, but a lot of opportunity to change higher education for the better in our region and beyond.