An across-the-board salary increase of about 2 percent for general-funded UW employees is on its way in the supplemental budget for fiscal year 2020.
Among the supplemental 2019-2020 budget approved by the Wyoming state legislature is $2.77 million for cost-of-living salary adjustments, applied to the first $80,000 of an employee’s salary. These increases will also apply to the UW Medical Education Program and the Enhanced Oil Recovery Commission, which were not included in last year’s pay raises, Associate Vice President of Human Resources Jeanne Durr said at the Spring Faculty and Staff Town Hall meeting on March 7.
“Now that those agencies are included in our budget we are able to provide these cost-of-living adjustments to those agencies as well,” Durr said. “We will be required, as an institution, to find the dollars for those non-general funded positions. Auxiliary kinds of services and grant-funded agencies will have to find those dollars on their own.”
“General fund” positions are those funded by the annual block grant that UW receives from the State of Wyoming, not including research funded positions, fees-funded Residence Life and Dining positions and “auxiliary services” positions such as Transit and Parking, said Durr.
This year’s increases are in addition to raises sourced from the 4 percent tuition increase that occurs annually unless the UW Board of Trustees votes against it in a given year. Half of those increases are set aside for faculty and staff raises, while the other half is dispersed across student-focused priorities following a request by previous ASUW President Seth Jones that the student government have more say in how that money is used. Before, it had been allocated to IT and the library system.
Also granted to the University for fiscal year 2020 is $4 million in one-time funds and $1 million in recurring funds, after requests for $17 million one-time and $2 million recurring were considered by the legislature. These requests will be directed to accounts such as the President’s Endowed Scholarship fund, Intercollegiate Athletics Competitiveness fund, Science Initiative Programmatic Funding and the Excellence in Agricultural Education and Research fund.
The School of Energy Resources received $4 million for a “fund to cultivate corporate investment in energy research,” of a requested $7.5 million.
The legislature also approved $11 million one-time for things not requested by UW, President Laurie Nichols said at the meeting, such as half a million for improvements for the rodeo program and five million for a “pilot carbon sequestration plant” for the School of Energy Resources.
“That’s the interesting thing about working through a legislative session,” Nichols said. “The legislators will come with their own ideas, and then you try to shape them and modify them to the extent you can but at the end of the day you’ll probably get some appropriation around things that maybe weren’t part of the original request, and that was true for us.”
Nichols called the final numbers for the additional budget requests a success, noting that the overall budget for the state is still recovering from previous cuts.
“In some ways we could maybe be disappointed that we didn’t get everything that we asked for, but the reality is you never do,” Nichols said. “In this time we live in right now, where the budget in the state is still what I would say a little bit vulnerable, I think to come away with almost $24 million in additional money, in a supplemental budget, is actually a huge victory.”
The full town hall meeting can be viewed online through WyoCast.
