The University of Colorado will slash 54 administrative positions and cut pay for top officials, the first steps in $29 million of budget cuts expected to be finalized in the coming weeks.
The moves, made public Friday, include shuttering the Silver & Gold Record, a newspaper that has covered the university’s faculty since 1970, and cutting the salaries of CU president Bruce Benson and other top administrators by 5 percent.
Benson said Friday that the cuts were painful but necessary, even though federal stimulus money makes up for funding slashed by the state legislature.
“We’ve got to start planning for the future rather than just go blindly forward and then say, ‘Oh, gosh, look what’s happening to us now,’ ” Benson said.
The cuts announced Friday will pare $6.3 million from the $39 million operating budget for the CU administration.
Another $23 million will be cut from the Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs and Anschutz Medical campuses.
Where those budgets will be trimmed is expected to be settled by mid-May.
The University of Colorado Board of Regents must approve the final budget.
Colorado lawmakers, facing a budget strain, cut millions from higher education. Federal stimulus money used to replace the $50 million cut from CU’s budget will run out in two years, and Benson said he could not in good conscience wait and hope everything will turn out OK.
“I can’t allow this institution to get to the point where we fall off the cliff,” he said. “Because then what we do is we have mass layoffs.”
The plan announced Friday included a broad reorganization of administrative functions for the four-campus system, which has a total budget of $2.4 billion.
“I have said from Day One we need to take a look at how this university operates,” said Benson, CU president for a little more than a year.
Two simple accounting changes, he said, eliminated an untold amount of paperwork.
The pay cuts will hit the university’s vice presidents and the campus chancellors in addition to Benson, whose salary will drop to $359,100 from $378,000. In all, the pay cuts for administrators are expected to save about $155,000.
Closing the Silver & Gold Record means eliminating what has been a campus institution for nearly four decades. The paper is expected to cease publication in the coming weeks, a move that will save nearly $600,000 a year and eliminate the equivalent of 6 1/2 full-time positions.
The paper’s staff, which included nine full-time and part-time workers and two student interns, was told about the move Friday morning.
“We were caught off-guard, and so was our editorial board,” said the paper’s editor, Jefferson Dodge.
As recently as three weeks ago, the staff had been told to expect a 25 percent budget cut, Dodge said, but there had been no mention that closing the paper was an option.
In a memorandum obtained by The Denver Post, Leonard Dinegar, vice president for administration and chief of staff, recommended the paper be shuttered and replaced with an online publication that would be used to disseminate information to the faculty and staff.
“Simply put,” Dinegar wrote to Benson, “the president’s office can no longer afford to be in the newspaper business.”
Benson said the decision was difficult but in line with the realities of changing technology.
“It’s just something that you have to say, ‘I’m going to swallow hard, and I’m going to do what we have to do,’ ” Benson said.
The budget cuts are likely to be repeated in 2010.
“We’re going to have to do something in a year,” Benson said.
Kevin Vaughan: 303-954-5019 or kvaughan@denverpost.com
