If you want to know why trimming government programs is so difficult, ask Gregory Carlson, a 22-year-old senior at the University of Colorado in Boulder who is student body treasurer.
Carlson, whose term in office expires next month, tells me he will graduate with a triple major in economics, math and political science. But his most valuable lesson in politics occurred when he and other student legislators who had campaigned on the same slate decided to fulfill their pledge of holding down college costs.
They began to hunt for savings in programs funded by more than $20 million in student fees. And having found some, they proposed cuts of more than $1 million.
Naturally, all hell broke loose.
“The people who show up at your meetings are the ones who will be directly impacted,” Carlson says, rather than the thousands of students who would benefit from lower fees but who aren’t inspired to voice their support. Opponents were indignant and vehement, as they usually are in such conflicts, and accused student lawmakers of refusing to listen.
“I felt some empathy for the lawmakers in Wisconsin,” Carlson says of the experience.
Weathering the storm, the legislative council in February lopped student fees by 5 percent. “In this era of burdensome economic challenges and unprecedented tuition rates,” student president William Taylor declared, “the student government felt obligated to reduce the cost of acquiring a higher education at the University of Colorado at Boulder . . . .”
Previous growth in fees had been “unsustainable,” Taylor told me last week. Indeed, according to the Boulder Daily Camera, mandatory fees had ballooned by 60 percent in the five years before Taylor and Carlson decided last year to recruit like-minded students — dare we call them fiscal conservatives? — to run as a slate.
By contrast, tuition had risen 48 percent during those five years, which is bad enough.
CU’s student government enjoys remarkable leeway. “We are the most autonomous and financially powerful student government in the nation,” Taylor maintains — which may well be the case given how they control the purse strings of multimillion-dollar enterprises such as the recreation center, student union, and the health center without much second-guessing from the central administration.
Rather than impose across-the- board reductions, student leaders asked every fees recipient to prepare several budgetary scenarios, from no cuts to a modest reduction of 5 percent. Student government had never done this, Taylor says — and to be fair, most complied without complaint.
What incited the most reaction were two bills that were justified even without cost-cutting in mind. One eliminated $100,000 in funding for the Interactive Theatre Project — which specializes in issues of “sexual assault, binge drinking, racism and other hot-button topics,” according to the Camera — because it had failed to conduct promised fund-raising. And the other, in a blow to the left-wing Colorado Public Interest and Research Group, barred groups receiving fees from hiring non-student employees.
It took a tremendous amount of work for Taylor, Carlson and their allies to keep faith with voters by actually reversing the trajectory of fees — at least for now. Moreover, they proved it could be done even without the prod of a budget deficit as motivation.
They reduced spending not because they had to, but because they thought it was only right at this difficult moment in time.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
