Budget proposals released Sunday by both the House of Delegates and Senate rejected former Gov. Tim Kaine's proposal to transfer $18.8 million from state universities to the commonwealth's general fund, a plan that would have ultimately raise student fees. Nevertheless, the Senate budget proposal includes a University student fee of about $75 per year, depending on the student's course load, and the House plan would cut funding for the Center for Politics, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and other University centers across the state.
"They're looking at anything they can identify and pick at," VFH President Robert Vaughan said. "There are a number of university-based centers and institutes at every state university that are being targeted and eliminated."
For VFH - an organization that promotes the humanities through public programs and grants to libraries and other nonprofit organizations - the proposed cuts could be particularly harmful.
"The reduction would ultimately eliminate us in the following year," said VFH President Rob Vaughan, whose organization mostly relies on state funds to operate but would lose $1.14 million for fiscal year 2012 with the House plan. "That's about 20 to 25 percent of our budget."
Deciding how to redistribute the remainder of the state funds may be one of the organization's greatest challenges.
"Having lost half a million [in the past three years] and losing even more means that we are really getting to bare bones," Vaughan said.
The Center for Politics also has much to lose with the House plan, which would cut $625,865 of its funding during fiscal year 2012.
The Center uses state funds to develop teaching resources for public schools across the state, provide oral and written histories of Virginia's elected officials and host programs that disseminate that information to the general public. The proposed cut even could affect the Center's signature program, the Youth Leadership Initiative, which educates grade school children about American democracy at thousands of public schools throughout the state, Stroup said.
"When we have budget cuts like the one that's being proposed by the house, when you zero out that money, the direct effect is to eliminate the programs that we offer to the K-12 community," said Ken Stroupe, chief of staff at the Center for Politics.
But the Center for Politics and VFH should not be overly alarmed yet, Stroupe said, as neither the Senate plan nor the governor's recommendation includes cuts to those programs.\n"We are far too early in the budget process to worry," he said. "The budget we have today is not the budget we will have a month from now."
Colette Sheehy, the University's vice president for management and budget, agreed that the process is far from finished.
"The House and Senate didn't agree on a lot of things," she said. "We won't know until March."
In fact, the budget proposals could have been worse, Sheehy said.
"The fact that they did not cut higher education any more is a positive thing, given the cuts that we have already experienced," she said.
The House and Senate committees will finish their respective proposals Thursday, before a conference committee can work out the differences. The conference committee then will report to each chamber, and the governor will have the opportunity to amend the proposal.
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