Bargaining Session Report
Our latest bargaining meeting with the Oakland team was Monday, July 12, 2021. At this session, both sides were seeking to bring closure to several noneconomic proposals that have been put on the table. We don’t have specifics to report to you today, but we are hopeful that several items will be resolved soon. The two teams are scheduled to meet again on Thursday, July 15.
As we work to resolve noneconomic matters and look ahead to economic proposals, we would like to call our members’ attention to the General Fund Budget and Tuition Rates for Fiscal Year 2022 that was approved on Monday, June 21, 2021 by Oakland’s Board of Trustees. While we encourage members to review the document as a whole on their own, we would like to make note of two particular items:
- The budget approved is, in part, “based on the Governor’s and Senate’s higher education appropriation budget proposals with a 2% increase.”While it is sound to estimate a small, 2% increase, Oakland expressed confidence that the state appropriation increase, to be finalized in July, would actually likely be higher.
- Oakland’s Fiscal Year 2022 budget includes a full single-year expenditure of $6,942,893 to reserve funds because Oakland used that amount in fiscal year 2021 during the height of the COVID pandemic. It is our understanding that the decision to return this full amount to reserves in a single year, rather than using it for current needs, constitutes just that, a choice made by Oakland.
This Fiscal Year 2022 approved General Fund Budget can be viewed in the larger context of the financial analysis performed for the AAUP by Dr. Rudy Fichtenbaum. For those of you who missed it when it was first posted in May, you can find it here. Relevant to this post, his report shows that Oakland’s net assets, including unrestricted financial assets, have been growing steadily for the past 20 years (Figure 14, for example).