President Steve Leath and the Iowa

Board of Regents have been working diligently to offset potential

budget cuts from the Iowa House of Representatives.

At present, there are three levels

of possible funding that have been proposed to legislature, one of

which was proposed by Gov. Branstad of an additional $20 million

for the coming fiscal year. The senate is looking to up the

allocated funds to $31 million, while the House of Representatives

is looking at a $34.5 million cut.

Warren Madden, vice president of

Business and Finance, says there is a likelihood that the number

will the end up somewhere in the middle, but it is hard to

predict.

“The challenge the legislators have

is sorting out the priorities of the state in which the

universities and higher education are an important part,” he said.

“If you look back historically, back where things tend to end up,

the governor’s recommendation tends to be fairly close.”

Of the $32.5 million cut proposed by

the House, $13.1 million will come from Iowa State. Madden said he

believes that the state has some increased resources that can be

committed and depending on who allocates the money, whether it is

legislature or the regents, Iowa State could see roughly 40

percent.

Leath is leading the effort for Iowa

State to raise money and combat the rising level of costs due to

unprecedented enrollment numbers and keep tuition down for

students.

“What I want to do with the

legislature, in the short term is to increase money,” Leath said.

“The governor is behind it, the Senate is behind it. We’re having

trouble with the house.”

Leath has been making regular trips

to the capitol and meeting with the Joint Education Appropriation

subcommittee. He is also trying to meet individual legislators to

build trust with the statehouse.

“The other thing I want to do with

legislature is to start building the sort of relationship where

they realize that despite what they’ve heard in the past and

despite preconceived prejudices, we are very responsible with our

money, we’re accountable with the funds we get, and we’re going to

be transparent about it,” he said.

Leath is sticking to what he

proposed last fall as a presidential candidate, and is looking to

help the university to maximize efficiencies.

“That’s the other part of this whole

legislative piece this spring is to get them to feel that while I’m

here, that’s how we’re going to operate,” Leath said.

He did not rule out tuition rates,

but he is looking to it as a last resort.

“At the same time, I’d like to raise

revenue which is really a number of options,” Leath said. “One is

tuition, I put that in the back. So private funding and state

appropriations, and then of course we want to raise grant funding

and overhead that comes with it.”

Leath said he is cautiously

optimistic. He does not yet have a plan if Iowa State does not get

the funds it is looking for. However, he did assemble a team to

plan what will be happening over the next few years.

“What that means is we’ll

essentially not have the resources to put toward all the new

students, so it will be very difficult if we don’t get the

increase,” Leath said. “To have over 30,000 students seemed

unrealistic not that many years ago.”

Now Leath is examining the

implications of having so many more students while trying to

maintain quality of education at Iowa State. He is also looking for

help from student leadership.

Regents member Greta Johnson is

taking an integral role in working at the university level to

convince the legislature what the universities need. According to

Johnson, they are taking an “all hands on deck approach” to make

communicating with legislature the priority.

“As a Board we work together and

make sure we’re communicating with the legislature what we see as

important and communicating the needs of the universities,” Johnson

said.

However, she also said that it was

too early to predict what will happen, but was

optimistic.

“I think there’s still a lot of

negotiations and conversations that need to be had before it all

comes to a close,” Johnson said, “But we would hope that what we’re

requesting would be as close to what we asked for as

possible.”