Less Costly Oversight for N.C. Universities | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Mitch Kokai, who is senior political analyst for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    The administrators who oversee public university campuses across North Carolina could see a tighter budget in the years ahead. Details about a positive budget development emerged recently during an uncharacteristically fractious meeting of the UNC system's Board of Governors.

    Reports about the meeting tended to focus on rare public disagreement among board members, an unanticipated proposal to put the brakes on student tuition and fee hikes, and even a suggestion that the university system's General Administration might move out of Chapel Hill.

    Lost amid that coverage was the news that the administration has been investigating zero-based budgeting.

    "This is the first time we are doing a zero-based budgeting exercise in this organization for not just programs, but personnel," UNC President Margaret Spellings told the board Sept. 7. "We've done time studies with every individual. We've allocated their time around a legislative mandate or requirement, a compliance requirement, and on and on."

    "We want to be completely transparent about this organization," Spellings continued, reminding the board that the General Administration employs roughly 260 people and costs about $65 million per year. The administration oversees the 17-campus system but not any individual UNC campus. "We ... look forward to sharing the very detailed information about how we spend our time and taxpayer money."

    Spellings offered those comments minutes after board member William Webb proposed a new 10-member committee "to review the role, purpose, size, and scope of General Administration." That review would focus on existing administration jobs, the roles of each office within the administration, and appropriate staffing levels. Webb called for a 45-day timeline for the new group's report.

    "One of the things I noticed when I looked at the organizational chart is the ... number of vacancies in various offices," Webb said. "Since I've been here, and I think since the president's been here, she's been looking at staffing issues."

    The full board will benefit from the detailed zero-based budgeting study, Spellings said. "I think it will be educational for you to see that we have 10 people working on a program the legislature has given us that's called Go Global," she said. "That underwrites travel for various people internationally and so forth. We have a lot of things that are given us that we run and manage. And we want to be completely open and transparent about this."

    The goal is increased efficiency, Spellings said. "There's nobody who has a keener interest in that than I do."

    Board Chairman Lou Bissette suggested that the zero-based budgeting work would help address the goals of Webb's new committee. "I think your task force here will be off to a good start because they're going to have an awful lot of information to begin with."

    Bissettte has reviewed much of that budget information. "I learned that close to 60 percent of our General Administration employees are there because they are mandated by statute or regulation," he said. "It's a compliance group."

    That comment about employees and compliance prompted board member David Powers to highlight his "pet peeve" about the General Administration. "We might be able to discover some things we might take to the General Assembly to address," Powers said. "The chair of the [U.S.] House Education Committee is a North Carolina congresswoman [Virginia Foxx]. We may even be able to do some things on the federal level. I think there's an opportunity there to make some changes in what I view as an extremely overly burdensome regulatory load on the university."

    One suspects that a BOG report emphasizing cost-saving compliance proposals would find a friendly audience within the legislature. Lawmakers already have demonstrated an interest in regulatory freedom. They have enacted a process to weed out unnecessary, outdated state rules. Legislators have taken recent steps to cut administrative costs within other sectors of taxpayer-funded education. They've also endorsed zero-based budgeting for selected state agencies.

    So while the UNC Board of Governors has been generating headlines in recent months for other reasons, its new effort to help tighten the university administration's belt deserves more recognition. Zero-based budgeting could produce positive long-term consequences.

    The university would see benefits long after today's headlines are forgotten.