State of the College January 24, 2014

Welcome back and I certainly hope that everyone had a great holiday. I intend to make reports to the college community several times throughout the year. I will rotate where I will be for these talks so my next one will be at the Fulton campus. I have spent the past two months listening to gain understanding about CCC. I have come to have a level of appreciation for the history, the culture and the people of CCC. I have heard from current employees, retirees, students, graduates, community members and so many more who have such great things to say about their relationship with the college. From Auburn Community College to Cayuga Community College you have a great history of serving your community and are valued and respected.
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To some extent that is why some of what I have to say today may not sit well with everyone. But I hope you will listen and as the year winds on we will have time to talk more and make plans for what we all agree will define the appropriate future for CCC that will be driven by a Vision and Mission for the future. A collective Vision and Mission, one that we all buy into and are willing to make a reality will serve as the framework for our future decisions and actions.
Today I want to spend some time telling you about what I have learned over the past two months. Although everything I learned is not positive I can tell you I have appreciated your willingness to be honest and candid with me and I have enjoyed my time with each of you. I also want to talk a bit about what I think we need to do to put CCC back on the path to a secure future and one that can continue to respect our past while preparing for the future.

I will continue my promise to be transparent, candid, honest and not patronizing but I do need to be clear I will be talking about things which could result in change at all levels of the organization. I would also ask you to consider that change is really nothing new; you have changed many times since 1954 and this will be just one more opportunity to be the community college you want to be. In the end it will be your choiceI want to help but it will be up to you if you choose to believe me and if you are willing to look at doing some things differently. I am going to talk about a number of things and my view of the situation. They are somewhat in the order of how I see the importance but that may change as we move towards what we can realistically deal with. Let me begin with a few words about the Governors budget. ashamed. He should be

Seriously, I dont even remember a time when any governor has been concerned about community college support.
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To some extent this is purely political as all governors know that the legislature has historically taken care of community colleges so this becomes a bargaining chip between the governor and legislature every year. However, at the moment we have no increase in base aid, no additional capital funding ( I am sorry Pete) a decrease in child care support (sorry Ed) and a new formula for calculating out of area chargebacks that could decrease our funding from Oswego county next year by over $900,000. We will begin the legislative process now and I ask that you have patience as we do this. I also would ask that the Faculty Association, Administrative Professionals, ESP and custodial organizations to use their influence in Albany to change the Governors proposal. The first item is the fund balance. As you probably know, we finished last year with a $56,000 negative fund balance. That is not good. The auditors pointed that out and the financial folks at SUNY have also expressed their concern about this. We must rebuild the fund balance to an acceptable level as quickly as possible. This means that we if we exceed our budgeted enrollment goal of 2900 for this year any additional revenues generated will need to go to fund
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balance; not to new positions or refilling positions or any other needed expense. In addition any monies that we can save from the planned expenditures for this year will also need to go to fund balance. A minimum fund balance should be about $1.5 million and more acceptable would be $3 million. As you can see, we have a long way to go on this front. However, we must be in a better financial position when Middle States arrives or we may not meet the standards concerning financial condition. Capital projects are certainly a concern for CCC. There are a number of projects that were started but not finished; projects where local money was raised but not approved at the state level; projects that were apparently not in the facilities master plan and wound up taking preference over planned projects; projects that have been put on hold as well as a significant amount of deferred maintenance that has not been funded. The Fulton Campus has been caught up in some serious entanglements with our Foundation but holds unfulfilled opportunity if solutions can be found to
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some pressing issues. It is unusual to have a full campus in a county that is not a sponsor of the college as is the case of the Fulton campus in Oswego County. In addition, a long standing arrangement has exempted Oswego County from paying capital chargebacks so the capital chargebacks paid by Cayuga County students and other out of area students have been designated to pay the long term debt on the college/county owned portion of River Glenn. This effectively uses all or most of the capital chargebacks for the next 30 years. This makes ongoing maintenance or future improvements at either campus problematic. It has also created an issue with the Cayuga County Legislature as they believe we have expended all or most of our chargebacks so any capital items they approve the County will have to pay for. If you followed the studio lighting or the VOIP phone system issue, this is the reason they would not approve the funding. We do hope they will approve the lighting at their meeting next week. Thanks for your patience Steve. The Foundation through its River Glen Holding Company owns the remainder of the property in Fulton and believes that the College will take full ownership of
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the $8-9 million property by 2016. There is a $7 million balloon payment due in 2016. This is currently under review as to just what commitments were made. Regardless, we are still paying roughly 700,000 per year to rent the store fronts from River Glen holding while we are still paying a similar amount to rent the Broadway facility for two more years. We do receive about 46% of those rents in rental aid from the state of New York. One of the potential solutions is to have Oswego county join as a sponsor of CCC and begin to pay capital chargebacks. This would be a real challenge and although we have begun some initial conversation with both counties this is a long term solution and will not help us immediately. In the meantime, we must find a way to improve our outreach in Oswego County and try to increase our enrollment there. To this end we have formed a Fulton Campus Advisory Committee made up of individuals in positions of value to us in the Oswego community. This is a step in bringing Fulton County closer to the College.

There are additional issues at the Fulton campus as there does not appear to be a firm plan on how to build out the remainder of the space and how that will be paid for nor has there been a concerted effort to rent the space to mission appropriate groups. I have already mentioned athletic fields but let me bring that back up along with residence halls. We clearly have a need to make ourselves more competitive in this ever increasing competitive environment. Without the facilities that other community colleges now have we are at a serious disadvantage. In my opinion we need to find a way to move both athletic fields and residence halls forward. The residence halls will have no cost, and should, if done right, make a positive contribution to our financial situation. Unfortunately, we have occurred a 600,000 debt for the halls that can only be recovered if we move ahead quickly with the construction of residence halls and use the plans that we have already paid for.

The downtown Auburn theatre project continues to be on hold pending the outcome of multi-year litigation. There should be a decision on the most recent lawsuit after February 11. However, that does not mean it is over. There could be additional lawsuits or actions that will further delay the bidding and construction of the project. In addition, I have raised some concerns about the lack of classroom space in the facility. If this is supposed to be an instructional facility, I would think we need spaces in which to conduct instruction. I have also begun discussion with the Musical Theatre leadership about rethinking the operational agreement. As it now stands, we own the theatre, the MTF uses it May to September and we have it for the academic year and we pay all operating expenses during this time. I want to be certain that we have a plan in place to use the theatre for the purpose for which we requested funding. There remain a lot of unknowns about this particular project. I am a proponent of mutually beneficial partnerships but only if they actually allow us to do something that we need to do and in a cost effective manner.

Community Colleges are basically enrollment driven institutions and our funding to a large part rises and falls with enrollment. The worst thing we could do is significantly overestimate our enrollment. However, that is exactly what happened here and we are now paying the price for that. Not meeting our enrollment projections is not the only cause of our financial issues but that certainly played a major role. Another concern around enrollment is the number of students that we lose fall to fall or even semester to semester. As you probably know, our retention numbers are not where we need them to be. We need to improve these numbers both because it is the right thing to do for students and it would certainly help us financially. This is always a complicated issue but we must really begin to address it if we are to make progress on the enrollment front. One thing that would make a difference would be to make certain that our advisement system is working to not only get students in but to keep them here. There is little doubt that the next thing coming at us will be performance based funding and it will be in our best interest to be ready for that by improving upon our student success models.
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I believe that our new outreach through Cayuga 101 might do a great deal to help see that students that come to Cayuga come better prepared and at the same time can generate additional FTE. Thanks to Sarah Yaw and all those involved with moving this forward. Another potential help could be a new scholarship program that would offer full tuition coverage to students from our service area that graduate in the Top 20% of their class. This has passed the finance committee of the College Foundation and will be voted on by the full body next week. Jeff Rosenthal and his folks are already preparing to roll this out assuming it passes. This scholarship will give us a chance to attract some new students for next fall. It will take time to grow but has proven to be a successful recruiting tool for top students at a number of community colleges. In addition, it brings a group of students to our campus that can fill honors programs and courses while raising the academic bar for all. I should point out that these are the students that do persist and graduate. We need to be doing more in the workforce development area but at the present time do not have the staff needed to expand to the extent we are
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capable. Carla continues to work on partnerships, especially with the Oswego BOCES that holds some promise for a better way of meeting some of the needs and fulfilling our mission. New academic program development needs to be accelerated if we are to reach a group of students that we have not historically been reaching in large numbers. That would be in certificate or new career programs that can put students directly into the workforce after a year or two with us. The planned Occupational Therapy Assisting program or the Event Management certificate are but two examples of the type of programs I refer to. It will be a goal to find what could be called venture capital to provide the start-up costs for new programs and new faculty. Part of our problem with program development is that we need to take money from existing needs until a new program is up running and generating FTE. This is a bad model and I believe we have some potential sources of start-up funds external to the college that could help in this area. We also have some relationships to build that will reestablish a level of confidence in our ability to manage our own financial affairs. This is true at
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both the local foundations, SUNY and the County level. To that end I have been communicating with our friends at SUNY and have spent a good deal of time at the legislature getting to know all of the players there. I believe everyone wants to see the college successful and understands our importance to the communities we serve. However, all our spending is under a high level of scrutiny and we must demonstrate that we can be fiscally responsible and that we have a strong focus and plan for the future if we are to regain that lost confidence. Budget development for 2014-15 will be another challenge. As I stated at the outset, the governors budget has done nothing to help us and the change in calculations for out of area chargebacks actually hurts us. In fact, I have been told that all but four community colleges will lose money as a result of the change. We have been building some budget models where we have made a number of assumptions. We are assuming at the end of the Albany machinations we will get $150 in base aid, we will raise tuition $150 and there will be no increase in local support. In addition we will face the loss of revenue from Oswego County and it is unlikely that we can count on a large increase in
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enrollment. We are tracking on target for this year but there is nothing that would indicate an enrollment burst next year. We have already discovered how painful significantly overstating our revenues can be and I nor the board will let that happen again. I do not see any way that we will be adding things to next years budget. If we exceed our enrollment goal for the year and maybe end up with a surplus in this years budget it will need to go to fund balance. It is my goal however, to get a balanced budget for next year that will allow for a year of stability while we make some plans and begin to implement some changes as a result. As you know, Maureen Erickson and Steve Keeler have agreed to co-chair the Middle States Self-Study committee. I cannot underestimate how important this process will be. At the moment we are most likely out of compliance with several standards most importantly those dealing with our financial condition. I also have some concerns about our ability to defend our total assessment process especially as it relates to non- instructional areas and also how we define and measure our institutional effectiveness. As you know, the Middle States process has become much more rigorous and the sanctions imposed for
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lack of meeting standards have increased. Where we used to get asked to simply provide a follow up report or address the issues in the periodic review report, some of our colleague institutions have been given warnings, had extra team visits assigned and threatened with probation. Let me turn to a bit more of what we can do about some of these issues. First, the presidential search is beginning and that will be an important time and one that will determine the type of presidential leadership you all want for the next decade or longer. Jeff Edwards put together a broad based search committee that will ensure input from all stake holders, internal and external. It is our desire to have the committee in place by the end of the month and begin the process in February. The committee will be seeking input from the College community as to what your expectations are for the next president of Cayuga Community College. I have offered to be of assistance to the board and the search committee as they carry out their work.

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We also have retained the services of Compass Consulting to undertake a thorough analysis of our financial and business operations with the goal of improving how this work is done and providing early alert systems for future financial problems. In addition they will help us unravel what I have dubbed the Mystery of River Glen. I dont mean to be to be glib here but there are multiple leases, multiple contracts and as many personal views of the situation as they are people involved. Regardless, in order to move forward with the Fulton campus we need a common understanding of what happened in order to determine what needs to take place next concerning ownership, debt and program for that campus. Gary Winger, one of the most respected former SUNY community college business officers will be on campus next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to undertake the beginning of the analysis. He has been spending the last several weeks reviewing documents, contract, leases and other pertinent information in preparation for his visit. It was highly recommended by SUNY that we undertake this activity.
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The other project underway is something that for now I am calling Cayuga 2020. This will be an opportunity to come together as a college community and define our vision for the future. We will need to think about what we want CCC to look like in 2020. I believe it is critical that we have a well-defined and agreed upon focus for the future that is based on a strong Vision, Mission and Values and that can lead to the development of a roadmap or plan to take us there. This needs to be a plan that does not sit on a shelf but one that becomes a real part of how we make decisions, allocate limited resources and how we provide continuous improvement. I have established a planning group made up of Jeff Rosenthal, Eric Zizza, Amy Valenti, Jo Ann Harris, Bob Frame, John Taylor, Terrie Kupp, Dale Lamphere and John Lamphere who will work with Larry Robinson from Partners and Robinson to develop the approach to achieving this goal. Larry had a great first meeting with the group and I look forward to working with them and all of you as we carry out this critical activity. There is also a lot of change occurring with our Board of Trustees. We are waiting for a replacement appointed by the Governor for Jane Bowen. George
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Fearon and Stan Kott have stepped down. We are awaiting the appointment of two board members by the County and one from the Governor. Once the full board is in place Larry will also work with them on board development. This is another important item for Middle States and we must show a strong system of governance and leadership throughout the college. I hope the outcome of all these activities leads to a new strategic direction and a constituent based planning process that links planning and budgeting, that reestablishes the trust that you tell me has been lost or at least the willingness to give others the benefit of the doubt. There may some of you who think everything is fine the way it is now. I have been there and I can tell you that what may look relatively calm on the surface sometimes hides real turmoil below that must be addressed. In the end it is up to you. The future financial stability of the college and our ability to continue providing educational opportunity to the community will depend on how we decide to change the path we have been on and find a new path that will lead to academic excellence and sound financial health. If you
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agree, and allow me, it will be my pleasure to work side by side with you as we deal with these challenges. I have been impressed with all those I have met and I believe that if we can together build an organization that tears down the silos of board, administration, faculty and staff we can design a Cayuga Community College that while respecting its past prepares itself for the future. Thank you.

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