Maryland State House
Not long after a state agency’s proposed cuts to the University System of Maryland budget prompted students to rally outside the capitol building in Annapolis, the state Senate recommended a budget with cuts that go even further.
The Senate approved yesterday an operating budget that would reduce system funding by $10 million from Gov. Martin O’Malley’s initial budget announced in January. While relatively low in the context of a more than $1.2 billion investment, it goes deeper than the $7.6 million in cuts the state’s Department of Legislative Services proposed last month.
System Chancellor Brit Kirwan, who has spoken before House and Senate committees to voice concern that any cuts would negatively impact university initiatives undertaken in the past year, said this development compounds his previous worries.
“This is just making what I thought was an unfortunate situation worse,” Kirwan said.
The Senate specified that the cuts should not reduce funds that prevent tuition from exceeding a 3 percent increase.
Each year, the operating budget is first taken up by one General Assembly chamber, alternating between the House of Delegates and the Senate. This year, it originated in the Senate, traditionally the chamber that does more to minimize reductions to university system funding.
The House proposed last year $4 million in up-front cuts and various transfers from the system’s fund balance — essentially, the system’s savings account — that amounted to about $10 million. The Senate proposed its own cuts a few weeks later, which totaled about $600,000 in transfers from the fund balance. From there, conference committees reconciled the discrepancy in the numbers, and the system ultimately faced no substantial reductions to its budget.
The House will review the budget and make reductions over the next few weeks that will then be reconciled by joint committees. Recent history suggests the House is unlikely to propose budget cuts lower than $10 million, but Kirwan said this year could prove an exception.
“It hasn’t been lost on me that the House has traditionally taken a larger cut,” Kirwan said, “But that doesn’t mean there’s any reason they have to always do that.”
The state’s budget process allows the General Assembly to make cuts to the governor’s initial budget proposal, but they can’t add to it.
In coming weeks, Kirwan said, the system will have to lobby aggressively with its allies in the House to minimize cuts that have now been recommended by both the Department of Legislative Services and the Senate.
“We consider this only the first step in a process that will play out over the next two or three weeks,” he said. “So we got a lot of work to do, and we will mount the maximum effort to make whatever cut we ultimately get as small as possible.”
This year’s budget is tight, a response to revelations in the fall that the state was running a structural deficit after the Board of Revenue Estimates revised its revenue figures. But Greg Fitzgerald, Maryland Higher Education Commission chief of staff, said he’d like to see reductions kept to a minimum.
“We’d like to see the money stay there because [it is] supporting very important initiatives. But there is a difficult fiscal environment to deal with, so we’re keeping an eye on it,” Fitzgerald said.
Student Government Association President Sam Zwerling said that in difficult fiscal times, the state can begin to show it has a strong commitment to higher education.
“We shouldn’t be balancing the state’s budget on the backs of students,” Zwerling said. “I think this is actually somewhat of an opportunity to show that not only do we want to see college affordable, we’re willing to make that decision in the tough times.”
