Initiative debuts to big crowd
Faculty lecture will be starry night
Crew tabbed to head UW’s K-12 leadership institute
President Carter to speak in Seattle
Researchers at UW expand on Hubble’s findings
Event to memorialize UW music professor
UWT opens one building and begins another
Radar mapping could yield clues to Antarctic ice activity
UW takes 4 requests to Olympia
Uncertainty abounds in wake of Initiative 695
Dick Thompson is taking his first University of Washington supplemental budget request to an uncertain Washington State Legislature.
The uncertainty stems from Initiative 695, which voters passed Nov. 2, effectively eliminating $750 million of state revenue on an annual basis. While it’s almost certain that I-695 will dominate the legislative landscape in 2000, no one knows for sure how. Thompson, who was recently hired as the UW’s director of government relations after serving for three years as director of the state’s Office of Financial Management, predicts a good-news, bad-news session for higher education.
“Our first goal is to avoid any cuts this year,” he said. “And we’ve got a good start in that the governor has proposed none.”
But the governor has also proposed no expansion, so supplemental proposals will face some difficulty, Thompson said.
Thompson hopes that because this session is merely an addendum to the 1999 session, which produced a two-year budget prior to passage of I-695, there won’t be any cuts. But there will probably be no expansion either because funds are already tight due to I-695, and they may get tighter in the 2001 session, when legislators must craft a two-year budget under the new economic constraints.
The UW is taking four specific supplemental budget requests to lawmakers in Olympia. They are:
“The governor’s budget didn’t include those requests,” Thompson said. “But what will happen in Olympia is anybody’s guess, especially with I-695 in the mix.”
Diversity outreach and recruitment has become a major focus for the university due to declining enrollment numbers for African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanic and Latino students. Those decreases come in the wake of I-200, the 1998 initiative that eliminated affirmative action by state agencies. The supplemental request would be used to expand recruiting efforts for qualified minority and disadvantaged students.
Specifically, the money would expand the high school tutor/mentor program, which already puts 125 UW students to work as tutors in area high schools; support the Pipeline Project, which trains UW students as high school tutors; create an eastern Washington student outreach coordinator position; continue a summer sciences and computer camp for rural high school students; and implement a pilot SAT/ACT preparatory program.
The additional funding for graduate assistants’ health coverage would help cover the rising costs of health care. No increase in state funding has occurred since the program began in 1993. The additional funding would maintain the current coverage. Without the money, the university would need to scale back the coverage, which already fails to cover students’ families.
The money for Internet connectivity is needed to keep the university online. Only half of last year’s $3 million request was granted. This is an expense the university didn’t have to pay prior to July 1999, but a contribution from NorthWest Net ended, forcing the UW to pay for this vital research link.
The need for a new Life Sciences I building and the remodeling of Kincaid Hall stems from the rapid growth in biological sciences, which saw a 396 percent increase in student credit hours from 1987 to 1999, according to Thompson. In 1998-99 alone, Thompson said, more than 1,000 students were denied access to courses because of space limitations. ¶
Steve Hill
University Week
The faculty and staff publication of the University of Washington
uweek@u.washington.edu
January 13, 2000