Gov. Tim Kaine's proposed state funding cuts will result in a $10.3 million budget reduction for the University and higher tuition costs for students next year, said Colette Sheehy, vice president for management and budget.
The cuts are part of a statewide initiative that Kaine proposed to close a $1.35 billion budget gap for 2010, Kaine spokesperson Gordon Hickey said. They include cuts to almost all higher education institutions, averaging about 7.7 percent, he said.
The $10.3 million cut from the University's commonwealth funding represents about eight percent of its budget, Sheehy said. Though Kaine originally projected a $19.25 million cut for the University, he used stimulus funds that had previously been applied for 2011 to reduce the amount, she said.
Kaine did not instruct schools on how to deal with the budget cuts.
"It's going to be up to the universities, individual schools, to decide how they're going to handle the cuts," Hickey said.
The University, though, had been anticipating the cuts and had "reserved a little bit of money in case there were reductions," Sheehy said. $1.8 million will be applied toward offsetting the $10.3 million reduction, she said.
More specifically, the University is now waiting for operating limit plans from its schools, she said, noting that each school will submit outlines detailing how it will manage the monetary decrease. Sheehy said she expects the individual schools will continue with strategies such as deferring building maintenance, holding positions vacant and not hiring as many people as originally intended.
These strategies are not sustainable for the long term, however, Sheehy said. Ideally, "the economy would start to pick up and the tax revenues would increase at the state level and the state would be able to provide additional funding for higher education," she said. However, such a rebound may not occur in the next two years.
"The other major revenue source we have is tuition," she said. "We'll have to look hard at what we do with tuition for the next academic year."
Sheehy explained that there will be an increase in tuition for the 2010-11 school year, adding that the increase will be "a question of magnitude."
The University also is in the process of deciding how to handle the one-day furlough Kaine proposed in his spending reduction plan.
"We don't know very much about the guidelines or how the furlough will be implemented yet," Sheehy said, noting that the question of furlough days is a complicated issue because many University employees are not paid with state funds. "We've never done that before, so it's something new for us to work through."
-Hunter Cook contributed to this article.
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