TO: All Employees
FR: Laura Lupei, Associate Vice-President for University Budget and Resource Planning
The 2022-2023 Campus Budget has been finalized and posted to the OpenBook portal, which can be accessed through the Budget Office website: https://budget.sonoma.edu/
With additional support from the state to the CSU, the campus has received an increase to base funding of $7M for the 2022-2023 year, which will cover most of the increases to employee salaries associated with collective bargaining agreements and other benefits increases. Also included in that allocation is some funding for permanent support for a campus Foster Youth Program.
Despite the additional funding from the state for this year, the campus continues to experience declining enrollment, which is affecting the tuition revenue and contributing to an ongoing base deficit. All campus divisions took base budget reductions for the 2022-2023 year, resulting in a remaining base deficit at $13.9M. In addition, there are anticipated one-time costs that increase this year’s total budgeted deficit to $15.9M.
There is a plan to fully resolve the deficit utilizing one-time funds for the 2022-2023 year utilizing many of the same approaches that have been used in recent years, including using prior year roll forward balances, available Higher Education Emergency Relief Funding (HEERF), campus reserves and anticipated one-time savings in the current year. All strategies used to solve the deficit in 2022-2023 are one-time solutions, which means that we still need to identify permanent, base solutions to resolve the base deficit.
Interim President Lee and his leadership team are focused on multi-year planning to increase enrollment and resolve the structural deficit as we begin planning for the 2023-2024 year. We encourage the campus community to engage with their President’s Budget Advisory Committee representatives as well as attend the Fall Budget and Planning Forum in November to hear more detail about the budget and the multi-year and strategic enrollment planning that is underway.
Please reach out to budget@sonoma.edu with any questions.