The UW System announced that the $25 million cut will now have to be covered through cuts in administrative support. This means that the approximately $600,000 cut to UW-Platteville that was reported in the Oct. 25 issue of the Exponent will have to also be covered through cuts in administrative services.

“Administrative cuts could mean looking to savings and money we did not plan to spend or rethinking purchases we had planned,” Rob Cramer, assistant chancellor of administrative services, said.
Cramer would not speculate as to whether these cuts could include job cuts within the administration.

These changes come in lieu of the most recent budget given to the UW System.

“The latest budget restricted where money could be cut from,” Duane Ford, dean of the College of Business, Industry, Life Science, and Agriculture, said.

Switching where these cuts will be made from will mean that the previous plan of cutting classes is no longer an option.

“As far as I know we will go with the normal schedule for spring,” Ford said. “This should mean no classes will be cut because of the state budget.”

Plans of where the money will specifically be cut from will not be available for several weeks.

“We need to wait until we get the exact numbers down from the UW System,” Cramer said. “Those numbers should come to us in the next few weeks.”

“They’re going through the budget line-by-line and trying to minimize damage to the universities,” Carol Sue Butts, vice chancellor and provost, said.

A full report to the UW System Board of Regents must be presented by the regents’ monthly meeting on Thursday and Friday Nov. 7 and 8, Barb Daus, special assistant to the chancellor, said.

“It is unfortunate that with the way things worked out with the delay that we have to be in this circumstance where things are quickly changing in the middle of the semester,” Ford said. “Whether there were cuts or not, if we had this information sooner we could have made decisions sooner.”

The budget was passed 116 days late by the Senate and Assembly of Wisconsin and signed the next day by Governor Doyle.

Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center) represents the 17th District in the Senate and voted against the budget.

“I voted no because from a school standpoint it is terrible and the school district will be hurting for a long time,” Schultz said. “I think the budget puts the weight of making decisions on the shoulders of
the university administrations when the legislature and the governor should be making them.”

“I am not one of those guys who didn’t want to raise taxes at all,” Schultz said. “I think the current system of school aid does not give back equally to all areas of the state.”

Phil Garthwaite represents the 49th District in the Assembly and voted to pass the budget.

“We had enough horsing around and real people were going to start to get hurt if we didnt pass this thing,” Garthwaite said. “I understand that we are not fixing every world problem in this budget, but you get the good things we can and get to work on what we couldn’t fix the next day.

“We got the GI Bill which was at risk of becoming an unfunded mandate on state universities passed in this budget,” Garthwaite said. “Many programs such as the Tri-State Initiative in Platteville that has been making some great gains were at risk if this didn’t pass.”