June 12, 2018
The Partnership Meeting and the Budget Reduction
First off, I want to thank you for the good participation in the Partnership Meeting last Thursday night (June 7). We had 81 sites that signed on to the Zoom meeting, and 79 stayed through until the very end. I believe that many of those sites had multiple viewers, so our actual attendance was higher than the 79 to 81 sites suggest. We did have some initial technological issues, but we quickly moved to our back up plans, and everything ended up working out fine. For those who would could not attend the meeting or would like to review it again, you may watch the recording of it at
https://mediasite.k-state.edu/mediasite/Play/4ad394270f1746b78ad8588dab0df84b1d.
Our next Partnership Meeting will be held on September 19, 2018 from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m. It will be via Zoom. We will aim to have it be more interactive, and we will have five local units make short presentations about the great Extension work that is going on in their counties or districts.
I also want to take this opportunity to address the upcoming budget reduction. We needed to reduce the Extension portion of the K-State Research and Extension budget by approximately $1.3 million. As you already know, our budget is tight and tough decisions had to be made.
We were forced to make substantial cuts to the Extension funding supporting the International Grains Program, the Center for Engagement and Community Development, Kansas Forest Service, and the Office of Local Government. We hope that these programs are able to find and backfill with other sources of funds.
Administratively, we will permanently transition from a three assistant director system (Assistant Director for Field Operations, Assistant Director for Family and Consumer Sciences, and the Assistant Director for Agriculture, Natural Resource and Community Development) to a two Assistant Director model. Dr. Jim Lindquist will continue as our Assistant Director for Field Operations, and Dr. Paula Peters will become our Assistant Director for Programs.
Open or soon-to-be-open positions are often victims of budget cuts. This budget cut was no exception. At our Southeast Research and Extension Center, we will have one open Extension agronomist position. Instead of having an Extension agronomist and a research agronomist, we will now have a single 50% Extension and 50% research position.
At the Southwest Research and Extension Center, we had a vacant irrigation specialist position. We will move from having two irrigation specialist positions to a single 50% Extension and 50% research irrigation specialist position. The Southwest Research and Extension Center will also lose an open office administrative support position.
On campus, we will lose 2.3 specialist positions. Two are due pending retirements. One is a weed science specialist position. The other is an agricultural economics specialist position. The remaining 0.30 will come from the College of Human Ecology. They had an open specialist position that was funded 30% by appropriated funds and 70% by endowed funds.
When the cash callback occurred last fall, we reduced the portion of agent salaries that we paid. We will unfortunately need to continue at our current participation rate until further notice. As long as we do not have further budget cuts, we will not need to make additional reductions in our participation in agent salaries.
Budget cuts are hard. There is no way around that fact. I apologize for the stress they have caused, are causing, and the ramifications they will generate in the near future. Budget cuts always make it feel like we have hit rock bottom.
There is an old saying about hitting rock bottom. Rock bottom makes an excellent foundation to build upon. Let’s now start building our future, together!