The California Faculty Association released a report Wednesday alleging inappropriate spending by the Cal State University’s top management, including raises for managers and hiring contractors for services the CFA said could be performed in-house for a cheaper price.
“CFA would like the governor to know that cost savings could occur at Golden Shore in Long Beach, the administrative site of the CSU,” Teri Yamada, the president of the Cal State Long Beach CFA chapter, said via e-mail. “In fact, it would be possible to sell that expensive building and move the administration to vacant office buildings held by Sacramento State.”
Yamada said most of the 23 campuses have already been “trimmed to the core,” but top-level spending has remained high.
The report, which can be viewed at calfac.org, includes 607 salary raises in the last two fiscal years to CSU managers and administrators, and contracts for lobbying and labor-relations services also performed in-house.
One example is a training program for bargaining, arbitration and mediation. According to the report, the contract cost $5,000 per day and the chancellor’s office paid the contractor $21,000 for travel expenses in one month in January 2009.
“We don’t need lobbyists when we have government relations people that are paid really good salaries,” said Kim Geron, vice president of the CFA. “It’s wasteful spending at a time when we don’t have any extra funding.”
Geron said the CSU has raised tuition to “exorbitant” levels. Fees in the CSU have doubled in the last decade.
“Now we’re being told campus presidents, who are already making large sums of money, are getting these extra raises,” he said. “All this money is real money that could be used for classes.”
Yamada said the CFA hasn’t received a response from the chancellor’s office.
“Nevertheless, we hope that the chancellor will be ethical and cooperate with the governor’s request to engage in frugality,” she said. “He could start by trimming his own car allowance and supporting SB 8, the transparency bill that allows public scrutiny of auxiliary accounts in the CSU.”
However, Erik Fallis, media relations specialist for the CSU chancellor’s office, said the facts are out there and the CFA’s accusations are nothing new.
“The CFA is currently in bargaining and they make a lot of statements,” Fallis said. “Certainly, they’ve made all these accusations before.”
Fallis said the CSU has invested in becoming more efficient, including cuts to the chancellor’s office.
A fact sheet at calstate.edu/budgetcentral shows where the CSU’s general fund is spent. Fallis said that only two-tenths of 1 percent is spent on top management salaries, and the largest piece of the pie goes to academic salaries.
“The problem is, you just look at the scale of the cut — half a billion dollars,” Fallis said. “Unfortunately, as much as we would want to protect our students from the cuts, when you’re being cut so deeply, there’s little that can be done to make all those cuts happen without the students and personnel noticing, especially when 85 percent of our budget is invested in people. We invest that in faculty that teach in the classroom and in student services.”
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