{"id":52877,"date":"2020-06-24T00:23:47","date_gmt":"2020-06-24T06:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/fort-lewis-college-trustees-approve-2-15-budget-reduction\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T04:02:01","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T10:02:01","slug":"fort-lewis-college-trustees-approve-2-15-budget-reduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/fort-lewis-college-trustees-approve-2-15-budget-reduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Fort Lewis College trustees approve 2.15% budget reduction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"The
The Fort Lewis College Board of Trustees approved a $47.52 million general fund budget for academic year 2020-21, a 2.15% decrease from the $48.56 million budget for academic year 2019-20.<\/span>Durango Herald file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

A $47.52 million general fund budget that lays off 12 employees and furloughs 11 others was approved Monday by the Fort Lewis College Board of Trustees for academic year 2020-21.<\/p>\n

The budget is a 2.15% reduction from the $48.56 million budget for the current year and includes no pay raise for faculty or employees.<\/p>\n

Budget cutting was necessary because of a drop in state revenues as public health measures taken to slow the spread of COVID-19 crushed the economy, closing stores, shops, restaurants and offices across the state and country, and lowering tax revenues.<\/p>\n

The state general fund took a $3.3 billion drop from last year. For universities and colleges, the Joint Budget Committee of the Colorado General Assembly cut $493 million from higher education. That blow was softened by an available $450 million from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act for higher ed.<\/p>\n

\"Stritikus\"
Stritikus<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

\u201cOur faculty, staff and students really felt like they were part of this process. We ran a transparent process that had lots of opportunity for engagement and maintained a positive culture at the college, which is really a testament to just how hard everybody\u2019s working. This could have turned out a lot different with people saying this was wrong, that was wrong, but you know everybody came together,\u201d said FLC President Tom Stritikus after the meeting.<\/p>\n

Most important for Stritikus is that resident and nonresident tuition did not increase for 2020-21, protecting the students from budgetary pain felt elsewhere on campus.<\/p>\n

Tuition will remain steady at $7,056 for residents and $17,712 for nonresidents for academic year 2020-21.<\/p>\n

FLC has written the 2020-21 budget with the assumption that enrollment will decline 7.5% next year.<\/p>\n

Many colleges and universities across the country are projecting 10% to 15% declines in enrollment as COVID-19 aftereffects have increased the number of graduating high school seniors who plan to take a gap year before entering college.<\/p>\n

Stritikus stressed fundraising continues for the Community Concert Hall, which took cuts in the upcoming budget.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe continue to try to raise money for the concert hall,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve already raised $250,000. And we want to raise $900,000, to make sure that the community is really underwriting the arts in our region and not our students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through difficult budgetary times, Stritikus said, the institution maturely dealt with the grim budgetary reality created by the novel coronavirus.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe held the culture together and we kept our eyes on where we\u2019re headed, and that\u2019s very difficult to do in situations like this,\u201d he told trustees.<\/p>\n

parmijo@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President says culture on campus held together through financial crunch<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52878,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1724,685,132,28,29,3528],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-52877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-budgets-and-budgeting","tag-coronavirus-covid-19","tag-fort-lewis-college","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter","tag-tom-stritikus"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88165,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52877\/revisions\/88165"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52877"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=52877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}