Higher ed could hit funding crisis

Some of Colorado’s top higher education officials and lawmakers fear the public was misled about the amount of money colleges and universities would receive from a 2005 ballot measure.

The measure, Referendum C, allows the state to keep excess tax revenues, and they worry confusion could hurt future financial reforms in academia.

University of Colorado President Hank Brown and others aired their concerns at a higher education summit held Friday and continuing today in Colorado Springs.

The summit is being attended by college leaders, former and current lawmakers, Gov. Bill Ritter, business leaders, policy experts and state officials.

Voters approved Referendum C in November 2005, allowing the state to keep several billion in surplus tax revenues for five years that would have otherwise been refunded to taxpayers. The measure was essentially a timeout from constitutional spending limits imposed by the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. It ends in budget year 2010-11.

Most of the excess revenue is supposed to be divided among higher education, health care and transportation, with each receiving 30 percent. For 2005-06, that amount was roughly $335 million apiece, yet higher education only saw $76 million in new money that year.

The rest of the $335 million, state budget officials said Friday, was used to fund what “might have been” cut if Referendum C had failed.

Todd Saliman, director of the Office of State Planning and Budget- ing, said Friday that Referendum C did not affect other requirements that dictate how money is spent on transportation, health care and K-12.

Without Referendum C, the state likely would have been forced to gut higher education, he said, which could have included school closures and other drastic measures.

“There are conversations that we would have had that never happened because of Referendum C,” he said.

Brown and others aren’t sure the public will see it that way. “I think I would not use the terminology that higher ed gets 30 percent of Ref. C,” Brown said. “We are not getting 30 percent.”

The confusion — even among college officials — could complicate efforts to reform higher education, some said, because the public might think higher education’s financial problems have been solved by Referendum C.

Come 2010-11, balancing the state budget will present many of the same challenges in funding higher education that it did before Referendum C. Higher education is one of the few areas of the budget not subject to heavily mandated spending requirements, leaving it vulnerable to cuts.

David Longanecker, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, in a presentation titled “Changing Direction,” warned summit participants that Colorado’s publicly funded higher education could collapse after Referendum C expires without major changes, and he predicted schools might turn on each other in the fight for funding.