University Presidents told the Board of Regents Wednesday that if they comply with budget cuts requested by the Governor, they will have to cut employees and programs.

One legislator says he has a better idea. Sen. Chris Steineger, a Kansas City Democrat, said instead of targeting employees and programs as a means to reduce spending, universities should consider getting rid of a few buildings.

“As a real estate investor I think they’ve invested too much in university real estate,” Steineger said. “The building maintenance costs are eating us up, and we need to redirect some of that spending to things like higher salaries for professors, so we can attract the very best professors out there.”

According to the Board of Regents as of 2007, there was $727 million worth of deferred maintenance programs among Regents institutions, including $150 million at KU alone.

“I don’t want to give the impression that I’m not a supporter of higher education,” Steineger said. “I got my undergraduate degree at K-State and my master’s at KU, my parents met while attending KU right after the war, and my grandfather was a college professor in Texas, so I have a long family history of supporting higher education. I’m just not sure that the spending decisions they make are always the right ones.”

Steineger said he is in the “austere but adequate” school of thought when it comes to educational institutions.

“Learning happens when you have kids with a desire to learn and teachers who love to teach. Everything else is subservient to that,” Steineger said.

Operating campus buildings also is expensive, he added. “It’s an expensive investment to heat and cool that many buildings.”

He said in his experience, campus renovation projects are usually inordinately expensive.

“I don’t have the exact figure, but the figure they spend per square foot to renovate buildings is very high.”

That’s not because of any flaw in the bidding process. Rather Steineger said he believed it stemmed from “the assumptions that are made about what needs to be replaced. University administrators came up in an era of American abundance and they tend to make extreme and expensive decisions about what needs to be replaced when they’re going about a renovation.”

There are other areas besides jobs and programs that the Board of Regents might scrutinize before lopping jobs and programs, Steineger said. “I think they spend too much on administration, too much on marketing that borders on self promotion, too much on dining and entertainment and too much on lobbyists.”

University officials plead their case during a Board of Regents retreat Wednesday.

KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway told Regents that, if the full 7 percent cut over two years is enacted, it would mean cutting between 100 and 125 positions on the Lawrence campus alone, as well as a similar number at KU Medical Center.

K-State President Jon Wefald said 180 positions, as well as about 400 class sections, would have to be axed.

Both indicated that increasing tuitions to offset reductions in state spending would be a last resort.

Karl Peterjohn, executive director of the Kansas Taxpayers Network, an advocacy group for taxpayers, said calling the reductions "budget cuts" was misleading.

“The rate of growth in spending in this year's budget was just over five percent, so if they cut 2 percent the first year as the Regents have suggested, that’s still 3 percent growth in spending. They’re not cuts – they’re just reductions in the rate of growth.”

Peterjohn said by his calculations, based on the 2007 edition of Kansas Fiscal Facts, Kansas spends about $30,000 per college student.

“If they can’t handle a little reduction, then perhaps we need better administrators on the Board of Regents,” he said.

The Week in Review