Jul 8, 2009One station set to close, more to come as budget crisis grows
Steve Love sounds a little weary and a little wary as he describes the fiscal crisis facing the University of Idaho’s Aberdeen Research and Extension Center and the looming cuts to be made by the university’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences to meet an 11.5 percent budget reduction in the 2010 fiscal year.
Love anticipates that a task force formed in April by the University of Idaho to recommend how to meet the reduced appropriation may close up to three research and Extension centers to meet the 2010 budget.
The current economic downturn has merely exacerbated an already pre-existing condition at the Aberdeen center of decreasing budget allocations and depleted staffing.
Love, the superintendent of the Aberdeen center, said that the station’s budget has been cut back so severely that it ran out of operating money in February for the fiscal year that ends in June.
“We just sent the bills to campus and they’re trying to find a way to pay them,” Love said. “We can’t just close and walk away. It’s really not an option, unless they choose to shut the place down.”
The University of Idaho announced on June 16 that it would be closing the Parma Research and Extension Center and moving faculty researchers to the Caldwell center about 30 minutes away as its first step in meeting the 2010 budget.
Mike Thornton, superintendent of the Parma center, was not surprised by the announcement.
“We’re not the smallest station, but we’re one of the medium stations and to meet the budget deficit you almost had to close one of the medium-sized stations,” Thornton said.
Thornton said the Parma center could remain open if they could come up with additional funding from industry or outside sources.
Love said that, five years ago, he had just under $200,000 to maintain the facility and pay the power bills, but the budget has gotten so tight that this year it was only $125,000.
“It’s been difficult, it’s been ugly,” he said.
Staffing has taken cuts, too. Every time a position at the research center becomes open, it is eliminated, Love said.
“We lost our main agronomist, soil fertility agronomist Bryan Hopkins – he took another job, which is happening a lot because we’re not competitive in salaries anymore,” Love said. “With our decrease in funding, when a position goes vacant it just gets lopped off.
“The state funding is down for obvious reasons, but we’ve gone through about eight years of cuts and so we were already down to bare bones when we went into the downturn. It’s down to the point where we either have to close facilities or fire entire projects’ worth of people.
“For example, the Department of Plant Soils and Entomological Science – that’s the department I work with for the research and Extension part of my appointment – five years ago, we had 56 people to do the job that we’ve been asked to do in this department, and now we have 42 and we’re still trying to do everything we were doing with 56 people and it’s not going to happen.
Part of the reduced state funding in agricultural-related programs can be attributed to Idaho’s changing political base, Love said. The state has become more urban, less rural, and with that change comes demands for increased funding for urban projects at the expense of rural and agricultural projects.
“”If we want to maintain the strength of our agricultural programs, there’s got to be a change in basic philosophy at the state level,”” Love said. “”The trend of our dismantling of our agricultural programs started way before this economic downturn.””
“”You kind of hope that people realize that agriculture is not a rural issue. It’s a food issue, which involves everybody, but that doesn’t mean that people understand that and will maintain support for it.”
-By William Schaefer, Idaho Editor ”
