After a day of closed-session meetings, Gov. Vilsack and Republicans on Capitol Hill reached a compromise with the education appropriations bill.

The compromise, reached Monday, appropriates about $3 million more to Iowa State than the original House recommendation.

“The Republicans have agreed to meet the governor at his request, which basically says the universities get as much next year as they were getting last year,” said Rep. Bill Witt, D-Cedar Falls.

Although the numbers are not final and the Senate has not yet voted on the bill, the compromise would allot Iowa State roughly $900,000 more than the university received in the fiscal year 2000. Those numbers do not include the deappropriation of $1.3 million at the beginning of the year.

“That means that basically they stay at ground zero from where we were this year,” Witt said. “All three schools took a hit for the deappropriations, but basically they stay the same from last year.”

The appropriations are still about $6 million less than Iowa State’s original base request for FY 2001.

“Where they get hurt is the inflationary cost; how do they deal with the inflationary cost?” Witt asked.

Speaker of the House Brent Siegrist, R-Council Bluffs, said the additional appropriations will still allow the universities to operate at a realistic level.

“It’s a reasonable amount; it’s not everything they wanted, obviously, but it’s still moving us ahead in the right direction,” he said.

Witt said although the appropriations may not be as high as the regent universities would like, the bill will do minimal damage to the universities.

Siegrist said the original controversy with the appropriations bill resulted from an attempt to finance other areas of education.

“This whole thing, which got a little ugly, was that we were attempting to force the Senate to find some money for alternative high schools for kids across the state,” he said. “We weren’t successful with that, so we had to find some way to keep that alive within the education budget.”

Witt said the universities will have to make up the extra money needed.

“That’s going to be up to the discretion of each president,” he said. “It gives all universities options on how they’re going to meet these shortages.”

Siegrist said the bill gives the regent universities some options in how to use the money.

“We give them a lot of flexibility in the language to say that besides the base budget general fund money, there are other things in there that will give them some flexibility to move that money around,” he said.

John McCarroll, director of University Relations, said there were no definite numbers available yet, so the administration is unsure how these new developments will affect Iowa State.

“We do not have, [at this time], any solid numbers from the Senate, but we’re hopeful for improvement in the bill that was approved by the House,” McCarroll said. “We’ll simply have to await the Senate’s action.”

Editor’s note: The Daily’s series, “Budget Crunch,” will resume Thursday with part three.