A financial presentation in March anticipated UMaine would need approximately $8.8 million in budget cuts to balance its budget. In June, additional state curtailments of funds and a reduction in expected credit hours raised that number to $11 million.

“After we did that public presentation in March, enrollment was still down for this coming fall, and we readjusted our budget down due to the expectation that we would have a smaller incoming class,” said Vice President for Administration and Finance Janet Waldron.

What is generally referred to as the university’s budget is actually its educational and general fund budget — made of funds that support academic programs and department costs. Revenue from tuition, fees, sales and services and state appropriations make up this budget. Waldron attributes the budget gap to a combination of falling enrollment, less state funding and the economy.

“Sales and service revenues have definitely been depressed by economic activity,” Waldron said.

The University of Maine is not the only state school facing a budget crisis. Each of the campuses in the University of Maine System has its share of state appropriations, and all of them have seen reductions. UMaine may be in a better position than other universities.

“Some universities have been able to build up some funds to fall back on, and the University of Maine is one of them,” said Rebecca Wyke, vice chancellor for finance and administration and treasurer for the system.

The University of Maine community will continue to see budget reductions and restructuring of colleges in coming years.

“The economic outlook for the state and nation is not good,” Wyke said. “We shouldn’t be expecting our two main sources of revenue — appropriations and tuition — to grow.”

UMaine is taking steps to ensure the success of the university, according to Waldron.

“An academic priority planning committee has been established to look at long-term answers,” Waldron said. This committee includes representatives from each college and members of the Faculty Senate.

While the faculty and administration plan for the university’s future, students in different colleges can expect to see budget reductions. Third-year mass communication student Shaina Dennis learned this firsthand when the mass communication and journalism department cut the advertising sequence from the journalism major.

“I found out two days before classes started that the advertising concentration was being phased out,” Dennis said.

She had to choose another major because she had recently switched into advertising and did not have enough credits in the program to graduate with her journalism degree.

“I feel like if you’re coming into the school and are interested in advertising outside of journalism, you won’t have those opportunities anymore,” Dennis said.

Dennis had bought all her books for her classes when she was informed of the change.

“I think they could have handled the situation a lot better,” she said.

Some factors that affect whether a class or concentration will be phased out are class size and the number of graduates it is producing.

“Reductions haven’t been arbitrary; they have been as thoughtful as possible, given the circumstances,” Waldron said.

According to Wyke, it is difficult to predict how the economy will continue to affect UMaine and the classes it is able to offer, but the long-term solution will be a compromise between academic quality and fiscal responsibility.

“We are in the business of helping people attain a higher education, not making it more difficult,” Wyke said.

In addition, 77 vacant positions were eliminated, for a total of 140 positions affected. The salary and benefits savings associated with eliminating or reducing these positions totals $5.8 million.

UMaine reduced its operating costs further by reducing travel, supplies, maintenance, equipment and related expenses by $1.7 million, according to the release. An additional $1.3 million will be eliminated through conservation at the administrative level.

All totaled, UMaine reduced its expenditures for the next fiscal year by $8.8 million.

In an interview, UMaine President Robert Kennedy said “hundreds of people were involved in making the decisions”. According to Kennedy, every department and program head was involved in the process. “Those decisions were made in the colleges and in the other service units,” said Kennedy. “The units tried to do it strategically to make as little impact, as negative impact on our programs as possible.

According to Kennedy, 43 faculty positions will be left open to accommodate the cut. In order to cover the gap in the number of faculty some colleges will hire adjunct professors to teach, whereas full-time faculty get money for research, class sizes may increase and in some cases classes may be scheduled less often.

In addition, the university has been able to use private money to hire for positions previously funded by public funds, according to Kennedy.

Fifteen of the layoffs come from UMaine’s salaried staff, including 10 positions at the Cutler Health Center. Four coaches were eliminated with UMaine’s volleyball and men’s soccer programs, and one faculty member who primarily worked with Cooperative Extension. The remaining 12 layoffs were hourly workers, including eight at Cutler Health Center. The Cutler Health Center layoffs came during the transition from a university-operated center to a center owned and operated by Eastern Maine Medical Center. Vice President for Administration and Finance Janet Waldron estimates six employees were hired back by EMMC after the transition.

Most of the reduced hours resulted in converting positions from 12-month positions to 10-month positions.

On March 14, the board of trustees created an ad hoc committee to review the idea of co-generation and to decide whether or not to buy a nine-megawatt turbine to provide electricity to the campus. It would also use steam from the steam plant to provide heat to some of the buildings on campus. Though Janet Waldron, vice president of administration and finance, did respond to LaBrecque’s request, she may not have responded in a way that would keep the matter from being taken to court.

Maine’s Freedom of Information Act states the following:

“If any body … who has custody or control of any public record, shall refuse to so inspect of copy or abstract a public record, the denial shall be made by the body or agency or official in writing, stating the reason for denial, within five working days of the request for inspection by any person. ”

Waldron e-mailed and sent a hard copy to LaBrecque the day after he submitted the FOI. In the letter, she said:

“Due to the extensive nature of your request, it will take time to locate and determine if the requested record(s) exist(s), in what for they are kept, and where they are located. Once we have done this, we will inform you what records we find pertinent to you request, and at what location you can inspect them and make copies if you choose to do so … The University is not limited to five days to respond, as you suggest, but has a reasonable time in order to do so.”

Although the university was not required to provide all of the records to LaBrecque within five days, it was required to provide some sort of list of which documents it could or would not provide in order to ward off an appeal. LaBrecque said the university did not contact him concerning the FOI following Waldron’s response. Following the university’s five-day time limit, LaBrecque, according to the Maine Freedom of Information Act, had an additional five days in order to file an appeal. He said he took the university’s lack of information and contact as a denial and had no choice but to take the matter to court. LaBrecque said he believes the university did not provide the information in hopes to be able to ignore the FOI all together.

Anita Wihry, executive director of Facilities Management, said the administration has been working on obtaining the requested records since the FOI was submitted, and that Waldron’s letter should be considered legally as a proper response.

“We’re collecting materials as we speak,” Wihry said. “I can’t imagine we’d have the intention to withhold anything.”

LaBrecque said if the administration had contacted him previously with whatever information they had found at the time, assuring him that the rest of the records would be provided as soon as possible, then he wouldn’t have filed the appeal.

“The part of this that disturbs me is that the taxpayers have to buy an attorney now for absolutely no reason. It’s more of a waste of public money,” LaBrecque said. “If they were reasonable and professional, we could have gotten most of this across in simple discussion.”

Another matter LaBrecque had raised with his FOI is that of Cianbro, a company which LaBrecque suspected was paid $40,000 for a report in June 2004 on a different co-generation proposal. Scott Morrison, Cianbro’s vice president for business development, said that the Marine Applied Physics Corporation, not Cianbro, paid for the report.

“Cianbro volunteered their time for the study. We were never paid,” Morrison said.

LaBrecque said he is glad Cianbro did not pay for what he feels was a worthless study without any substance.

“I had thought it was out of their character,” LaBrecque said. “It’s a good, honest company.”

LaBrecque had suspected Cianbro was paid because the name of the company is on the cover of the report. He included the topic in his FOI in order to find out if they had been paid and, regardless of who was paid, from where the money came. He said he was told by an employee of Facilities Management that the money was taken out of funds for the recreation center.

LaBrecque’s FOI also requests electricity records for the new Engineering and Science Building. He said the electricity costs are around $1,000 per day. Wihry said the university needs to spend a lot of money on electricity because of the presence of a Class 1000 clean room, which requires air to be constantly replaced in order to keep it clean for laboratory purposes, and because of all the large machinery in the building.

LaBrecque presented the court appeal to Interim President Robert Kennedy at Kennedy’s student forum on Thursday. He told Kennedy that engineering students who made comments to The Maine Campus were bullied by the administration into apologizing for and retracting what they said. LaBrecque said that Kennedy told him he was sure that wasn’t the case. LaBrecque said he will ask Kennedy to make a public announcement as to what his position is on the bullying of students or faculty who talk to the press and what assurances and safeguards there are in the event that this sort of bullying occurs to anybody on campus.

LaBrecque has also filed an objection concerning the sub-committee formed by the board of trustees to review the co-generation proposal and make positive recommendation or not to Chancellor Joseph Westphal. LaBrecque said three members of the five-member committee, Dave Wilson, Joanne Yestramski and Janet Waldron should not be allowed to be members because the resolution passed by the board of trustees states that the sub-committee would be made up of members of the Finance-Facilities Committee, to which none of the three belong. LaBrecque said Barry McCrum, chair of the committee, told him the three forced themselves onto the co-generation sub-committee. LaBrecque said the three are administrators, already have expressed their support for the proposal. Even if the other members objected to the proposal, they would have the majority.

“Janet Waldron had a well-planned scheme consisting of all the elements of a surprised attack, including standard bait and switch tactics and arrangements to run interference on opposition to co-generation,” LaBrcque said.

On March 14, the board of trustees voted unanimously to create an ad hoc committee to review the concept of cogeneration, the producing of electricity and heat at the same time by using the steam generated from providing electricity to generate heat. The administration is requesting $9 million to build the facility and could, according to Joe Carr, UMaine interim director of public affairs, reap vast economic profit. Carr said conservative estimates for the amount of net profit the university could make over a 15-year period range from $6 to $17 million, depending on the size of the engine purchased.

“It’s important, as a public facility, that we look at any way we can to save costs,” Carr said. “I think it’s really good news. The potential is outstanding.”

Carr also said the turbine would be good for the environment because they would be burning mostly natural gas with possibly some oil.

Janet Waldron, vice president of administration and finance, said the university would make money from selling the excess electricity produced by the large turbine to the Bangor Hydro power grid. The profits from selling electricity and the money the university would save through cogeneration could mean money saved for students as well, since the university could reduce a possible future tuition increase by two percent, Waldron said.

“All the information we have would point to this as being an excellent option for the campus,” Waldron said.

Much of the university’s engineering department students and faculty, however, believe the building of the power plant would be a huge mistake, especially if the administration decides to purchase the used nine-megawatt turbine engine from Georgia Pacific, which has given the university priority on it before they open it up further into the market, said Jesse Packard, a UMaine mechanical engineering student. Packard said the university would most likely lose money with this plan because the turbine is too large and the grid is so competitive that they would not be able to sell the extra electricity, and what they did sell wouldn’t be at a high price.

Energy expert and former mechanical engineering professor Dick Hill has also expressed his concern for the efficiency of the turbine. He said the university is not fit for cogeneration because they need much more heat than they do electricity. The turbine would produce too much electricity and not enough steam for heat, Hill said. In order to produce more heat with the turbine, they’d have to burn #2 oil, which is expensive and not environmentally friendly.

Jim Lebreque, an outside businessman who designs and builds process control systems and who has had a long-term relationship with the UMaine’s engineering department, said there are several reasons why the university would be interested in purchasing the oversized turbine.

One reason could be that they would rather throw a lot of money at a big project that would be easy to sell to the public than to spend money on a bunch of less expensive but numerous updates on the current infrastructure to make the campus more energy efficient, Lebreque said. He said that the recent Barrows Hall addition was so poorly built that it costs $1,000 per day for electricity and increased total campus use of electricity by ten percent. Also, the university runs air conditioning in buildings during winter months and heats the sky boxes at Alfond Stadium during the winter for almost $8,000 a month just so coaches can bring potential players there to help in recruitment, Lebreque said.

“The incompetence of the facilities engineering department has accumulated so many long-term energy problems that I believe they feel that a cogeneration project can be a fix-all to cover all their past mistakes,” Lebreque said.

Lebreque is investigating is the utility lawyer, the university hired to consult them, Tony Buxton in choosing a company which could research cogeneration possibilities and find a suitable turbine. Buxton referred the university to Comprehensive Energy Services, a company Lebreque said Buxton actually owns a portion of.

Lebreque has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain scores of records, bills and other documents that would settle many disputes, including whether the figures the Waldron has released to the press concerning the financial and environmental benefits cogeneration would provide were indeed accurate or not. Lebreque said he believes these figures are false and that the research required to obtain actual figures didn’t begin until two weeks after the numbers were released to the press.

In his FOI, Lebreque is also requesting documents which would either prove or disprove that the university paid $40,000 out of the fund for the student recreation center to Cianbro a year ago. At the time, the university was looking into a different cogeneration plan which Lebreque was very actively against. The university paid Cianbro to gather information which would support the plan and hopefully keep him quiet, Lebreque said. He obtained a copy of the presentation package Cianbro produced for the money and said he has not found one engineering professor who thinks the presentation and information is in any way useful, factual or productive. The university eventually decided not to pursue the Cianbro plan. Leqbreque said an employee of the department of administration and finance told him the money came out of the student recreation fund, which is made up of students’ tuition money.

As to a timeline for the university to provide the information, the Maine Freedom of Information Act states that if a governmental agency refuses to relinquish certain information, the individual that requested the information has five days from the date of refusal to appeal to a court.

“Until somebody starts asking some hard questions and delves into the public record, they’ll throw $9 million at a cogeneration system that’ll be very costly for the university,” Lebreque said.

Lebreque said that if the university refuses to disclose necessary information, then he will take the issue to court and will participate in a rally in front of the chancellor’s house.

“People who have something to hide unfortunately have unlimited legal funds supported by the tax payers and they will use them to the greatest extent possible,” Lebreque said. “They truly have something to hide, and they’re doing a damn good job of hiding it.”

Lebreque has been working closely with engineering students Packard, Chris Leech and Ryan Stanley in researching the proposal themselves and trying to figure out what it would really mean for the university. Packard said doing so has been difficult, though, since the administration had refused to provide them with the information they would need to accurately determine figures. The administration has also not consulted the engineering department at all for assistance in helping with their energy problem, but has instead hired out-of-state firms to aid them, even though the students and faculty are highly capable and more than willing to provide their assistance, Packard said.

“This is a big slap in the face to the engineering department,” said Stanley.