Dateline: November 1, 2007

State restores CC's vetoed funds 

Clarendon College will receive more than $460,000 in funding previously vetoed by Gov. Rick Perry, college officials confirmed last week.

“The governor made his point,” CC Interim President Bill Auvenshine said Thursday. “There are many employees in community colleges paid with local funds, and the law says state funds can’t pay for those employees’ health insurance.”

Clarendon College isn’t one of those schools, he said. All of CC’s employees, except for maintenance staff, are paid with state funds. But CC was caught up with all of the other Texas community colleges when back in June Perry vetoed $153.9 million in appropriations for employee and retiree health insurance in fiscal year 2008-2009.

Last Tuesday, Perry and legislative leaders restored $99 million unconditionally and a one-time allocation of $55 million. The restoration of funding last week came with a condition by the governor that the state must address the issue of proportionality, which deals with those colleges which have employees paid partially with state funds and partially with local funds.

Auvenshine said this condition will not hurt CC, but it will impact large schools like Amarillo College.

“The real issue is the state has been giving less and less to community colleges over the last 40 years,” Auvenshine said. “Where we received 70 percent of our funding from the state in the late 1960s, today we receive about 48 percent; and some bigger colleges are over 60 percent locally funded now.”

Auvenshine also said community colleges have not recovered from the state budget cuts of 2003 despite the fact that the two-year schools are “the best buy in education” and the fact that Texas community college enrollment is growing rapidly.

Speaking at a Donley County Republican Party dinner Thursday night, State Rep. Warren Chisum (R-Pampa) said the governor’s June veto had come as a complete surprise and that he and other leaders immediately worked to restore the funding.

“We convinced (the governor) that we weren’t going to do anything until we fixed the junior college funding,” Chisum said.

Chisum also talked about the state having an estimated $11 billion in surplus.

Asked about the possibility of restoring funds for CC which were previously cut, Chisum said he didn’t think those cuts had affected Clarendon College.

According Enterprise files from February 2003, Clarendon College lost $193,000 in funds and had to eliminate five positions when the state faced a $1.8 billion shortfall. Even though the state has had surplus revenues since then, those funds have not been restored, college officials have repeatedly said.