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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

President's Message


This week, New York approved the 2014-2015 budget. We went into this session with high hopes for continued and expanded community college restoration. Our collective advocacy across all state community colleges, SUNY and CUNY, was for a restoration of $250 per full-time equivalent student (FTE). This would have brought our community colleges back to 2009-2010 funding; that is, our funding level of five years ago.

Unfortunately, we did not receive this support.

Going into final budget negotiations, the Assembly—which typically has taken the lead on restoration—had budgeted just $50 restoration/FTE. In contrast, the Senate had budgeted $200. In the end, the restoration was $75/FTE. Without question, this limited restoration will have an impact on MCC’s budget. As a reminder, 82% of our budget is driven by employee salary and benefits, which leaves us little room to absorb this impact.

This year, the Budget Resource Committee (BRC), which includes more than 40 members from across MCC, provided some excellent and strong student-centered thinking and recommendations regarding flexible workforce. Given this year’s budget, the BRC’s effort is proving very timely and useful, and their recommendations will inform how we think and rethink about our resources going forward.

The bright spot in this year’s state budget is capital funding. As we know, MCC's new downtown campus has been funded and supported by our local sponsor, Monroe County. Going into this budget, with the renaming of the old “Renaissance Square” funding, the new downtown campus had also achieved all but $6.6M in state matching dollars. The Assembly did not include the project on its funded capital list; the Senate did include the project. By the time final negotiations ended, MCC’s new downtown campus was fully funded! (Note: The approved funding will be included in a “clean up” bill in late April.)

Achieving the funding for our new downtown campus is an extraordinary milestone more than two decades in the making, and it deserves celebration. This success comes from the collective impact of many individuals across all sorts of lines: students, faculty, staff, trustees, alums, county and city leadership, city residents, business and community leaders, SUNY, state legislators, governor, and more. In this effort, we were allMCC.

There’s a central lesson to take from the new downtown campus success: it is the power of that coalition in support of MCC. As the dust settles on this year and we look to next year’s budget, I encourage you to join us in forming a college coalition with a new focus: increasing public investment in higher education.

Let’s inspire our state to support our inspirational work—if any college can do it, it’s MCC!

Leave your comments here.

Anne M. Kress
President's Office
04/03/2014