MCC’s budget gives more control to department chairs
Dominic DeCono
With a new year comes a new way of doing business as usual
MCC Vice President Jeff Darbut has unveiled a new method to handle how the budget of every school club, department and athletic program will be managed.
Instead of having the same amount of money being rolled over from semester to semester for each department, Darbut has given more control of the budget to each department’s chairperson.
Shouan Pan, President of MCC, believes the new process for the budget is a very positive step for the school.
“This new process is to prevent overlap of the previous budgets and reduce wasteful spending. It’s a step in the right direction,” he said.
Andy Baldwin, department chair for Life Science, said the new method looked scary at first but makes total sense.
“What Darbut is doing is cutting money from each department to a flat line amount and then having each department submit requests for any additional money they need,” he said.
For example, according to department chair of justice studies Bert Ouderkirk, last year his department was given approximately $13,000 in total to use for the fall semester.
This semester the department will start with only $7,000 but will be able to request for more money in order to make ends meet.
The new method is designed to cut costs by using a more accurate distribution method for the amount of money each program needs.
At first the vice president didn’t make it aware to the chairs of each department of the new method and many members of the faculty panicked because they saw their annual budgets drop significantly without warning.
“A lot of people got really scared initially but then Darbut called a meeting for the chairperson of each department and explained it in good detail. It’s a good plan and it makes sense. Everyone came away from the meeting feeling a little more at ease,” Baldwin said.
Darbut also doesn’t believe there will be any money issues for the departments.
“I see no reason why every department won’t be able to get access to money they will need. We’ve done a good job of organizing this budget to get money to people more appropriately and faster,” he said.
The biggest concern some students have about this budget change is whether or not it will affect the quality of education.
Haley Thomson, a first year student at MCC, isn’t sure the new budget will be beneficial to everyone.
“I really think the budget has to be preapproved and any extra money goes back to the school. It sounds like this could potentially harm smaller programs,” she said.
Andre Salais, president of Secular Student Alliance, believes the budget changes are long overdue.
