By COLE REIF
Great Bend Post
The numbers are preliminary. A lot will change over the next couple of months, but Barton Community College Vice President of Administration Mark Dean presented the college’s fiscal year 2024 preliminary budget to the Board of Trustees Tuesday. Dean showed a projected $2.2 million loss for the upcoming budget.
While the college is expected to receive additional funds in
tuition and taxes, the state aid portion of Barton’s revenue is down more than
a $1 million. Dean said a new, fully-funded state formula is not calculated in the budget yet.
"The governor signed the budget bill," said Dean. "We're still not 100-percent clear what is all going to be included in there. I anticipate that will go up as long as nothing negative changes with the bill. That should go up considerably."
Barton is expected to shell out just shy of $19 million in salaries for the
2024 fiscal year, which is a decrease of $450,000 from the current school year.
Dean said many long-time employees retired which dropped that number along with
19 current open positions and no wage adjustment has been calculated in the
figure yet.
Each year, several departments request additional strategic plan
items and this year there were more than $18 million in requests. Dean stated
some wishes will be approved and others will not and last year there was less
than $1 million approved in additional requests.
"Hopefully, we'll be able to fund some of that, but we need to know exactly where our revenue is," said Dean. "I'll know more at this time next month once we're 100-percent sure what the state budget is going to do."
When Dean presented last spring at approximately the same time, he showed a
$1.8 million deficit for the 2023 budget. He came back in June 2023 with the
deficit at $943,000.