We had deferred our capital expenditures and other expenditures like planned maintenance. So just to summarize briefly what happened in FY20, we ended up in fairly good shape. That's our clear goal is to not let this crisis make us take a step backwards in terms of where our priorities are and our strategic plans. And then finally, what we want to do, again, consistent with fiscal restraint, is continue to invest in our core mission. Then our priority was- and we can now announce that we can alleviate the financial impact of the budget on our faculty and staff, all of the university employees, consistent with the first two priorities. And we took budget actions that were necessary to be able to ensure that first priority.īeyond that, we also, of course, wanted to preserve the educational quality of our programs for our students and of course, our research and scholarship that our faculty pursue. When we started these, both precautionary actions and building our testing program and our tracing programs, our priorities were to maintain the health and safety of our community, and to preserve jobs, as Martha has said. I'll summarize a little bit where we ended up in this spring, so the last fiscal year, and the impact of that on our budget, our assumptions and precautionary actions- which you, of course, know about, but I'll just summarize briefly going into this fiscal year- and where we are currently, our current forecast that's allowed us to take the action that Martha just described.Īnd so let me just say a few things first about our priorities. And I want to begin with our budget priorities, how we're thinking about the most important actions to take. So I'm going to update you on where we were at the end of fiscal year '20 and then our projections going into what is our current fiscal year. And Martha has told you the what, and I'm going to basically tell you the how and the why. And with that, I want to turn things over to Provost Kotlikoff. Again, it will become effective January 1. I'm so glad we can announce this positive change. Unfortunately, they were necessary, both to preserve jobs to the maximum extent possible and to ensure that our students had a meaningful and safe educational experience here. I know that the benefit and salary reductions have been very difficult. But we will begin again providing full retirement benefits and full salaries. Now, please note that all the other cost containment steps- the hiring freeze, the ban on discretionary spending, and so on- those have to remain in place through the end of the fiscal year. So starting on January 1, we are going to again start providing full retirement benefits and full salaries. And I am delighted to tell you that we reached that milestone, that our projections now show that by December 31, after the five months of benefits or salary reductions, we will have achieved sufficient savings, along with the other actions that we've taken, to feel reasonably confident of a balanced budget for the fiscal year. Provost Kotlikoff, Vice President Opperman, and Vice President Streeter will share with you the details of our budget performance and our projections for the rest of the fiscal year, which goes through July 1.īut I wanted to kick this off with some good news, because back last summer, we made a second promise as well, and that was that we would stop the reductions in either the retirement contribution or the salary, whichever applies to you, as soon as we possibly could- that is, as soon as we could be confident that the other actions taken would allow us to achieve a balanced budget. We promised you that we would carefully monitor our situation, and that we would report back to you before the end of the calendar year. Back last summer, we met with all of you to describe the financial crunch that we were facing as we dealt with the COVID pandemic.
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