In a moment where inflation is at a 40-year high and salaries remain both consistently low and stagnant (in the midst of inflation, the lack of even of a cost of living adjustments constitutes a pay cut) for faculty and staff, the possibility of a parking hike is both outrageous and predicable given the leadership of this university. What is the faculty senate doing to increase salaries for faculty and staff; what efforts are being made to combat the level of inflation not only seen nationally but in our own backyard .err parking lots?
Dr. David Leonard
School of Languages, Cultures and Race
This is not related to inflation, but also I wonder to what end will the extra profits generated by parking hikes be put? To improve the parking lots? To hire more faculty? I’ve been told that parking has been a profitable department over the years, and good for them. The parking staff deserves a raise. But what is the need to increase parking’s profits at the direct expense of WSU students, faculty, and staff in the face of rising tuition and stagnant salaries? At the risk of connecting the wrong dots, I forward one possible answer:
Despite united opposition by students, staff, and faculty, last spring the Board of Regents approved the administration’s athletics budget plan, which included a new policy that beginning fiscal year 2023, WSU will use central funds to pay the $2-3M annual PAC-12 membership fee. The Athletics Department is in such dire financial straits due to over-spending on new sports-only buildings financed by external bondholders (athletics hasn’t been able to cover its own “mortgage payments” for years—hence their ~$80M of internal debt) and outrageously high salaries for a few coaches that apparently now it can no longer even pay its own ante for the privilege to sit at a table in the corporate casino that is big-time college sports.
The newly promised $2-3M of university money for PAC-12 fees will have to come from somewhere, of course. For years, profits from parking and from housing & dining have been used to cover the hole blown in WSU’s annual budget by athletics’ deficit-spending ways. Increasing parking fees is one way to wring some of that additional money out of faculty and students, who ironically enough were largely opposed to throwing more university funds at athletics’ sinking ship. If I’m wrong someone please let me know, but increasing parking fees sure feels like one of the predictable negative consequences of the myopic decision to continue to subsidize an athletics program that has unwisely grown too large for our small market, as WSU students, staff, and faculty clearly recognized and argued (to no avail) last spring. As many of us suspected at the time, it isn’t just the academic departments that will have to withstand years of crippling budget cuts to ensure that the athletics department can continue to hemorrhage WSU’s money to pay for construction it couldn’t afford in the first place. Individual employees and students will now be expected to use more of their stagnant income to pay off part of that tab as well. And as the budget plan presented to the Board of Regents last spring shows, it is a very large tab: >$200M of athletics’ external debt stretching out through 2041. Given that outlook, one might want to invest next year’s parking permit payment in an e-bike instead.
Thanks for everyone’s input. I plan to provide more details via a senate blog, but for the time being, the President has confirmed that the funds from fee increases will only be spent as described by parking services. Much can be said for the need for greater transparency with this process, but with respect to redirection of parking revenue towards athletics or other non-parking expenditures, the answer is that this simply is not the case. These funds will only be used as described by Transportation Service. The President will address this point during his presentation to Faculty Senate on April 7th. Thank you for considering this information.
With regard to the above question: What is the faculty senate doing to increase salaries for faculty and staff; what efforts are being made to combat the level of inflation not only seen nationally but in our own backyard?
The state legislature has approved a salary increase this spring. The exact timing and amount will depend on details that are being actively modeled by VP Stacy Pearson’s team, and I suspect will depend, on part, on other considerations such as if the Board of Regents approves the tuition increase proposal. We will learn more soon, but I want to point out that Faculty Senate has no control over salaries beyond working with the President to ensure that this remains a top priority when our budget request goes to the legislature, and when determining how mass salary increases are allocated (by Faculty Manual formula, or across the board). The President has indicated that increased salary support remains a top priority for the next biennium budget. That is the best we can ask for given the manner in which state higher education is funded in Washington State. Faculty Senate has no control over fiscal or inflationary policies.