FILE - In this March 10, 2016, file photo, the Legislative Building is shown at dusk at the Capitol in Olympia, Wash.
Centralia College is looking at options to fill a shortfall in funds for some salaries and projects after the Legislature failed to pass a capital budget that included over $1.4 million for the educational institution.
College President Bob Mohrbacher said the college was expecting to receive $174,000 in operating funds, $500,000 in minor project funding, $600,000 for roofs and $180,000 for repairs and minor improvements.
The two-year capital budget was not approved after the third special session came to an end. It has been placed on hold after lawmakers couldn’t agree on a water-rights bill following a court ruling known as the Hirst Decision. The ruling shifted the cost of research into water availability before drilling new wells to local governments or homeowners. Department of Ecology data had formerly been used.
The delay in a capital budget will likely push back a building the college had hoped to construct to house its child and family studies program, which is currently located in old homes that have been deemed inadequate and hard to maintain.
The building was more than five years out, but now it could be pushed back a lot further, Mohrbacher said, because of the backlog that will be created for capital projects.
“If projects on the list and those that are in progress are held up or don’t get funded at all then we could be decades down the road before we get to our next project,” he said.
The college is unsure of how it will proceed while trying to find a way to fill the gaps, especially with the lack of $174,000 in operating funds, which includes salary money for the college’s maintenance and operations staff.
Currently, the maintenance and operations department has 16 full-time positions and five part-time employees.
“We have to make cuts somewhere to keep paying those salaries and we can’t afford to cut those positions because we just opened a big building and we are already short staffed,” Mohrbacher said, referring to the recently opened TransAlta Commons building. “We really now have to scramble to figure out where to make up $174,000 in the budget and other schools that are shutting down capital budget projects with buildings partway built are in a very precarious situation.”
According to Mohrbacher, South Puget Sound College has a building that is two-thirds of the way built, but the lack of a capital budget has brought construction to a halt.
In the Chehalis School District, the construction of an intermediary school that will house third- through fifth-graders has been postponed, as the bidding process was delayed since the construction is funded in part by $25 million in state money through the school construction assistance program.
Phase 1, construction of the school that houses kindergarten through second-grade, is already under construction and is not impacted.
The money the college is expecting is less certain as time goes on, according to Mohrbacher, causing more concern.
“Our assumption is if they can come to an agreement and pass it sometime soon — say this summer or very early fall — that they will backfill that money to July 1,” he said. “On the other hand, if it goes on for months and nothing happens until January or when the supplemental budget is approved, then it’s not at all certain that it will be backfilled.”
For now, Mohrbacher said the college can use its reserve funding on a temporary basis. If a budget is not in place within the next month, then the budget review and planning committee will begin to look at alternate plans.
