CSU Bakersfield held a virtual budget forum on zoom on Monday, March 21, 2022. President Lynnette Zelezny had mixed impressions of the governor’s budget and looked at May’s revised budget. According to Zelezny, “We need additional funding for mandatory cost, increases, and faculty and staff salaries, investment in the graduation initiative and deferred maintenance.”

Zelezny also talked about how the appropriation of the Energy Innovation Center is in the governor’s budget. Charles Lam, a member of the university budget committee and mathematics professor, spoke about how to get to the budget forum on the CSUB website. He instructed to go to the bottom of the website, click on budget central, and on the left click on the university budget book. According to Lam some of the issues that are being looked into are maintenance issues with salary inversion and faculty ranks.

Thom Davis, the vice president, talked about the status of the California State University system. Davis mentioned the request from the board of trustees in Nov 2021, the request was $715.5million of reoccurring money.

Davis said, “it was a bit of a bold request, but a needed request.”

One of the requests was $263.8 million, which was just simply to cover the CSU mandatory costs. There was also a graduation initiative request which was $75 million.

According to Davis, “this has been a reoccurring request that we’ve had for the last several years as many of you are aware.”

There were seven requests for different things and according to Davis, “fast forward into January where the governor signals his initial thoughts on the budget and you can see that he really only addressed two things that the board of trustees had requested.”

These things included providing $211.1 million in mandatory cost and $81 million in enrollment growth. The mandatory cost that CSU had requested was $263.8 million, according to Davis, “so we at this point are not being covered for our mandatory costs.”

Davis said, “and then you’ll also notice silent hear the governor is not providing at this time the legislation any money to our reoccurring budget for graduation initiative 2025 basic needs, digital equity, addressing the State University Grant as well as academic facilities and infrastructure.”

The governor did signal some one-time money, Davis said, “he would be interested in providing the CSU $100 million in deferred maintenance and energy efficiency.”

Davis said some good news for our campus is that the governor has signaled that he’s interested in finding the EnergyInnovation Building at $83 million, and the governor indicated that he would provide one-time money of $50 million for University Farms.

Speaking about the advocacy budget, Davis said, “we’re asking with the legislation to give us an additional $52 million so that we can simply cover our mandatory cost and by the way, these mandatory costs will include the projected salary increases as a relate to The CFA salary increases.”

In addition to reoccurring money, CSU is asking for one-time money of an additional $900million to address infrastructure, Davis said.

Natasha Hayes, the director of the budget, said, “over the past two years CSUB has received$80.6 million in Higher Education Emergency Relief Funding.”

HEERF supports and provides for the children in the institutions. During the pandemic, the score received 33.4 million in HEERF funds for student grants and according to Hayes it is now distributed 100% to the students. Additionally, there was $47.2 million in HEERF funding for institutional expenses.

According to Hayes, “We have utilized $7.4 million of these funds supplementing student eight grants as well.”

Hayes said that in total CSUB has awarded just over 43,000 grants to students which is totaling $40.8 million.