ECC board approves budget for FY2012

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Updated: August 3, 2011 8:50PM

ELGIN — If you put Elgin Community College’s budget for current fiscal year 2011 side-by-side with the budget for upcoming fiscal year 2012, they’d be about identical, said Sharon Konny, the college’s vice president of business and finance.

The Elgin Community College District 509 Board of Trustees approved that balanced budget 5-2 at its meeting Tuesday evening.

Trustees John Dalton and Robert Getz voted against the 2012 budget. Both said they objected to parts of the auxiliary operating parameters included in the budget, which Getz said the board has voted on separately in past years.

Otherwise, Getz said, “I believe the annual budget is a good budget.” The auxiliary operating parameters break down how programs, like the college’s bookstore and athletics, are subsidized. Most break even, according to a table in the annual budget document.

That budget will take effect July 1 and runs through June 30, 2012.

Its total revenue is $144.45 million — 54 percent from local property taxes and other local income and 30.5 percent from tuition and fees, which trustees voted in January to raise for the first time in four years. That $8 hike brings tuition to $99 per credit hour for the 2011-12 school year at Elgin Community College.

The other 12 percent of that revenue comes from the state government. The budget shows the actual revenue the college has received from the state as of April is about half what the college had budgeted.

But that’s only because the state’s $3 million contribution to the college’s pension fund usually is “the last entry we make for the year,” Konny said.

“They’ve been pretty timely with our monthly payments. It’s nice. They slow down their payments when they get to the end of the year because they start running out of money, so we may get a slowdown soon,” she said.

The timing isn’t bad, though, she pointed out: The college should receive its first property tax dollars this week, she said.

That’s a stark contrast to the fiscal bind the state has put area school districts like U46 and 300 in as it has cut and failed to make payments to those districts.

The college’s expenditures total $164.80 million, and its single largest expense is salaries, followed by employee benefits.

It recently ended seven months of contentious negotiations with the Elgin Community College Faculty Association with no base pay increase for full-time faculty and modest increases for those who obtain more experience and education. It currently is negotiating new contract terms with its support staff and will begin negotiations with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers soon, according to the annual budget document.

That $20 million gap between expenditures and revenues in ECC’s FY 2012 budget will be filled by money from the $85 million in bonds the college sold last year, according to Konny. It has spent only $40 million of that money to date, she said.