Time & Location: 8:30 – 10:30 a.m., 220 Seymour
Attendees
Voting Members
- Mike Andriatch
- Joy Bhadury
- Davida Bloom
- Frances Dearing
- Scott Haines
- Jim Haynes
- Debbie Jacob
- Josh Johannes
- Sara Kelly
- Kadathur Lakshmanan
- Jose Maliekal
- Brad Menear
- Dave Mihalyov
- Chantelle Nasri
- Cherise Oakley
- Summer Reiner
- Sandeep Singh
- Kathryn Wilson
Non-Voting Members
- Denise Copelton: Co-Chair
- Crystal Hallenbeck
- Lou Spiro: Co-Chair
- Melissa Wight
Guests
- Jamie Beers-Wilson
- Julie Caswell
- Wendy Cranmer
- Kerry Gotham
- John Osowski
- Kevin Rice
- Brad Schreiber
- Laurie Smith
Regrets
Voting Members
- Steven Breslawski
- Tom Hernandez
- Shanelle Hodge
- Teresa Major
Non-Voting Members
- President Macpherson
- Kathleen Peterson
- Karen Riotto
The meeting was called to order at 8:31am
Approval of April 5, 2018 Minutes
Dr. Copelton asked the committee to review the minutes from the April 5, 2018 meeting. With no corrections, Dr. Lakshmanan motioned the minutes to be approved, Ms. Jacob seconded the motion, and all were in favor so the minutes were approved.
Announcements
Dr. Copelton stated that the minutes from the April 12, 2018 meeting are not currently available and will be distributed at our next meeting.
Division Presentations
Note: Presentations are available on Blackboard and on the JPBC website.
The following questions, answers, and discussion points occurred during the following presentations.
Division of Advancement
Presented by Mr. Mike Andriatch, Vice President for Advancement
Dr. Bhadury: This would be your second campaign? These priorities, what was the planning
process because I am not seeing anything that is targeting the three Schools? Were the Deans
consulted, were faculty consulted?
Mr. Andriatch: As part of the Strategic Planning process for the College, yes. But we have not gotten into specifics of these yet. They are general categories.
Dr. Bhadury: At the university level?
Mr. Andriatch: Yes. This is what we have talked about during Strategic Planning and with the Foundation Board. We had about 15 different areas that we shared with the Board. This is not to say that this is everything that we will do. So, if there are priorities you are going to have, Dr. Maliekal is going to have, and Dr. Hernandez is going to have on a School level then there will still be opportunities for that.
Dr. Bhadury: As you implement them or start thinking about, think about experiential education or internships. Where do they go through? Most of them are department based or school based. Think about undergraduate research, the unique needs are different across the departments. As you flush this out, I am trying to say, we need a greater integration where the make-up of students where this is done.
Dr. Reiner: So, these priorities, I see how they support undergraduate students, but I want to
know what is being done for graduate students? Specifically, some of the things that I think
about that put us in a poor position in comparison to other institutions. For example, in my
program, we have site supervisors but because we are SUNY, we are not allowed to pay them but private schools do pay them, so our students don’t get the internships. Or, we have some
graduate students that end up homeless. So, there are a lot of funding needs. We have a lot of
graduate students drop out because they simply can’t afford school. I guess, what I heard is that there will be a connection with the Deans, but I don’t know in what way the Center for Graduate Studies is being consulted around these priorities and what is being done for those students.
Mr. Andriatch: We will have an open conversation when we get to that point. That’s what will all go on when the Campaign Consultant comes on board. For those who were around, we did a lot of that last time. We had several campus meetings. We will do the same thing. It is similar to what we did for the Strategic Plan. We can raise $5,000 here, $10,000 there that is not going to move the needle in terms of the millions we are talking about. These are general categories. So, all the stuff that goes on during a daily basis… that is still going to continue. These are going to be focuses of what we need in terms of big dollars. We are talking 10, 20 plus million dollars potentially to have an impact.
Dr. Reiner: I could be wrong, but I don’t think we offer extraordinary scholarships to graduate students.
Mr. Andriatch: There will be general scholarships.
Dr. Reiner: Part of my comment is across the divisions, that often graduate students are left out of the priorities.
Mr. Andriatch: The Deans are overseeing those areas so that is a big part of the conversations going forward.
Dr. Bloom: These interviews with the potential major donors, is it for sure that a Skype phone call and well executed is much less effective than an in person conversation? Do you really have to fly someone to where a person is, house them, and have a face-to-face interview?
Mr. Andriatch: It is more effective, when you are talking to someone about seven or eight figure gifts. It is hard to cram that conversation into 45-60 minutes. It can be up to half of a day with lunch and dinner in all these different conversations.
Dr. Bhadury: Another point, the importance of doing this New York City or downstate program is becoming increasingly important now when we are looking at student demographics. For our own business plan, we were looking where students came from. It’s looking like a sizeable number come from downstate. So, we need to start paying more attention to how we find opportunities for those of our students, using our alumni and using our contacts outside our immediate service area, because significant students seem to be coming from there.
Mr. Andriatch: There is no question about that and one of the things that has been great about Brockport is historically a big chunk of our student population from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s was from downstate and they have gone back to the New York, Long Island, Connecticut areas. So, when we do events there it is not difficult to draw those alumni to get involved. So, we have a great base there. We have 7,000-8,000 people down in the metropolitan area. Right, Mr. Gotham?
Mr. Gotham: Yes. Actually when we started doing some of the student events, we looked at the demographics of the undergraduates and there were between 1500-2000 that we found from Poughkeepsie to downstate. When we looked at doing programs with Career Services to do more career networking and really utilize that alumni network. The job fair in Rochester is great but for a kid going back downstate, it isn’t going to do anything for them. So, we are starting to build more connections down there so they can use the Brockport network when they go back home.
Dr. Bhadury: So, Mr. Gotham between 1500-2000 of our current students are from downstate?
Mr. Gotham: Correct.
Dr. Wilson: Right now, about 26% of our students are from downstate.
Dr. Copelton: I just have a question about the life-long learning. Is the goal ultimately to
involve people in college life so that we can gain more donors?
Mr. Andriatch: Absolutely. We want to give them a great experience at Brockport. Dr.
Dauenhaur has done a great job and Mr. Haines’ group has been awesome because they get a
pass to use the recreation facilities at an inexpensive rate and they get a parking pass at a
significantly reduced rate. They also get tickets to one art event a semester. So, there has been great collaboration. A lot of these people are engaged with the institution. It is strengthening
partnerships that we have and bringing in new people as well. There is research out there that
people want to retire in a college community because of all of the opportunities. I know people who have done that in Brockport and they have become engaged with the College. I know one is an adjunct professor who had nothing to do with Brockport but saw this as a great place to move. I think the more that we can build and put a structure to this the better. There are great programs out there like what RIT does, but we are trying to build a little bit of our home base and see what happens.
Dr. Maliekal: Recently, I read a book and I learned an idea that other colleges are trying out
and maybe this is something that we might consider. These colleges have created virtual
communities. Here is an example, one young lady was trying to get a job with Nike. She was
nervous on how to approach the interview. She sent a question on the bulletin board of that
virtual community. She began getting suggestions. Eventually someone who is working at the
Human Resource Department at Nike, who is an alum of that college, got back to her and said
these are the kinds of questions that we typically ask. Going forward, might we consider
building a virtual community so that we establish this link between are students and our alums that are now all over the world?
Mr. Gotham: We have multiple platforms that are existing now including social media, which we monitor all of the time. We have someone in the Marketing Office and someone in our office that scour that 100% of the time. We do get those requests whether it is Facebook, Twitter and also through LinkedIn. We have groups specifically for Brockport Alumni and closed groups for Brockport Alumni. The platform that we have and some of the Alumni may be on it, it is called Brockport Alumni Connect and the company is Graduway. That is exactly what that platform is and this spring, very soon, we will entering our seniors in there. So, our seniors going out will be able to connect with alumni on that platform. We have about 2,000 alumni in there and that is exactly what it is for. You can do a search on your own. There is no middle person. They go in there, it is very intuitive and they can search for those connections. So, we do have that process. Next fall, we will probably be talking with Career Services and we may let our juniors and seniors in there to have our students network and utilize that platform.
Mr. Mihalyov: Is the Campaign Consultant a one-time $50,000, $50,000 a year, or do you need to figure it out as you go?
Mr. Andriatch: We need to do an RFP and see. We do not anticipate that we would use the
consultant at the level that we did last time.
Mr. Mihalyov: But it could be over the course of the campaign.
Mr. Andriatch: Exactly. The first year would be the most and then it would go down.
Dr. Singh: This coordinator what would they coordinate?
Mr. Andriatch: For the Annual Fund?
Dr. Singh: Yes.
Mr. Andriatch: We used to have two people in the Annual Fund office. Right now, we have one person who is managing the whole operation who has other significant responsibilities. This person would manage all of our mailings, which we do multiple times a year to different portions of the database. Also, our calling program, which is smaller than it used to be. We will still do that. Our Day of Giving, which is an enormous undertaking. Faculty Staff Campaign. All these different pieces that go into the Annual Fund, unrestricted dollars. Several other individual projects, working with the Golden Eagle Society because that is a big undertaking. All the mailings that go into that and the outreach.
Division of Administration & Finance
Presented by Mr. Lou Spiro, Vice President for Administration & Finance
Dr. Bhadury: The capital funds are different from our own College Reserves, right?
Mr. Spiro: Correct.
Dr. Copelton: Can you clarify what types of trainings you mean here, what trainings and for
whom?
Mr. Spiro: So, there is a software package that we are looking at called, Everfi which allows us to provide a number of required compliance trainings.
Dr. Kelly: Like sexual harassment training and things like that, right?
Mr. Spiro: Right. Ms. Cranmer, can you provide some specifics on Everfi and what trainings it provides.
Ms. Cranmer: Everfi is all online and we have a number of compliance related trainings that we supposed to provide in a number of areas across campus including Human Resources. Such things like sexual harassment prevention training and diversity training. Beyond that, IT has training they are supposed to give. Environmental Health and Safety has training they are
supposed to give. So, there are a number of things that need to be delivered and many of those things need to be delivered on an annual basis. For the maintenance of system, someone needs to be able to support that because you need to know how many new employees are coming in and so you have to keep logs of that. Make sure people are getting notifications and updates. That is just one piece of the training. There is the online training; there is other training such as leadership development and other trainings we would like to do if we have resources for the entire campus community.
Dr. Copelton: So, some of this is for compliance purposes but not all of it.
Mr. Spiro: The online is for compliance but not all is for compliance. The Director for
Organizational Development, training would be more a leadership aspect of things.
Ms. Cranmer: In terms of organizational development, it is not just training. Organizational
development is looking at the entire workplace culture and supporting that in terms of managing change. Working with managers to be more effective. Working with teams to help teams become more effective. It is such a much more long-range approach as supposed to training, which would be just one day. Organizational development takes a more systematic approach to looking at how you support the workforce in terms of professional development and being successful in your jobs.
Dr. Bhadury: One of the prominent efforts that we have done as a university is the leadership
series. This particular person, Director of Organizational Development, let me understand, in
addition to the other things that you talked about, this is the person who is responsible for the
leadership development series.
Mr. Spiro: I would assume that would be a small part, maybe not.
Ms. Cranmer: This person can help facilitate the training but we have some individuals on the campus that have been identified who will facilitate that training.
Dr. Bhadury: Right, that is what I thought, so now we will have a staff person to do that.
Ms. Cranmer: Well, not entirely Dr. Bhadury. They might help because it is a five-day program and we will likely deliver it once or twice a year, a maximum of 50 leaders across the campus per year. Eventually, we wouldn’t have to do that, maybe just once a year. That person if they have expertise in certain parts of leadership development might come in and deliver certain aspects of the program but not all of the program. They can also help support the facilitators in the delivery of the program.
Dr. Bhadury: (Question related to reimbursing BASC for the EMS system license and staff
support) Correct me if I am wrong, but BASC annually puts in close to a million dollars
into the College budget, right?
Mr. Spiro: Not into the College budget, but for College use as BASC dollars.
Dr. Bhadury: So, instead of asking for new funds, what could be done is have them reduce their contribution to the College, that would draw out of this annual amount, which is $124,000 one time and $90,000 thereafter.
Mr. Spiro: One of the possibilities is to do it slightly differently, a great amount of College
reserves are in BASC, so to clear this up on a one time basis, take $124,000 out of College
Reserves that exist in BASC. I don’t know if you are familiar with what I am talking about.
Dr. Bhadury: No, I am not.
Mr. Spiro: So I believe, and don’t hold me to these figures, we have somewhere between nine to ten million dollars in College Reserves. I believe about seven million of that is BASC funds that they hold for us. Ms. Hallenbeck, am I pretty close on that?
Ms. Hallenbeck: I would say so.
Dr. Bhadury: So, of the nine to ten million of the reserves that we have, and our reserves by
SUNY standards have to be at least 10% with a goal of 25% but most campuses are at 10%. Of the nine to ten million dollars, you are saying that six to seven million comes from our non-state BASC?
Mr. Spiro: It is held in BASC
Ms. Hallenbeck: It has accumulated over the years but that amount is sitting over in BASC.
Mr. Spiro: The way SUNY calculates the reserves is not how we calculate reserves. I believe
they count things like IFR dollars reserves. We just made 10% in the most recent report, which I believe was in January, or February I think, but they calculate so much differently then we do. It is nice to have cleared the 10% but it doesn’t mean too much as to how we operate as a campus. A number of years back, when I was here the last time, we ended up paying for a NYSEDA project for Harrison that BASC was going to pay for but we ended up covering those costs and BASC kept the dollars in reserves for us. That is the short version and the amount has grown since.
Dr. Maliekal: This is more of a clarification. Is this idea of keeping money in BASC the typical way campuses across the system chose their reserves or are we unique in that?
Mr. Spiro: I can’t answer either way because I don’t know the answer to that.
Mr. Mihalyov: I thought one of the benefits of the online procurement system was it was
supposed to free up people’s current procurement duties, so are we not able to realign
someone’s duties to do these contract duties?
Mr. Spiro: That is not an area that I am as versed in as I would like to be to be able to answer
that question.
Ms. Hallenbeck: What you say is true. That was the plan all along that job duties would be
switching but I don’t know in what capacity it is going to create in that area.
Mr. Spiro: So that is something we will soon have to look at, but it is an area I don’t know
enough about.
Dr. Reiner: Where do the expenses of fringe benefits get counted?
Mr. Spiro: The good news is that for all State lines, we don’t pay fringe benefits. The State of
New York pays the fringe benefits.
Dr. Bhadury: Let’s say we have 3-4 million dollars in Central Reserves, there are contract
negotiations that are taking place and there seems to be a strong rumor that SUNY will not give us a maintenance of effort. In other words, any contractual obligation will have to come out of the reserves.
Mr. Mihalyov: I just want to clarify, it is not SUNY that won’t give it to us it is New York State.
Dr. Bhadury: You are talking about a 4-6% of a one-time hit and then an ongoing 2%, which is one million dollars. That will affect the three million in reserve that we have unless Albany will give us maintenance of effort, which it might not.
Mr. Spiro: That is why it is so important to finish off the five-year financial model. We will have a $200 increase in tuition and based on where the enrollment projections are, that is probably going to cover at minimum the base salary increases and maybe a lot of the retroactive stuff. Without having the model done, we don’t have all the data to know if it will work for sure.
Ms. Hallenbeck: There are constantly moving pieces because our tuition overflow comes into our reserves. Summer session overflow, salary savings overflow. So, that is another challenge in creating our model.
Mr. Spiro: So, when we start refilling any line that hasn’t been filled for a couple of years that reduces the base available and it also reduces the annual salary savings overflow. So, we really need to look at all of those things at the same time and model it out to see how it effects the ongoing base and cash.
Mr. Haines: When we don’t fill a line that goes into the salary savings, what happens to the
fringe the State isn’t paying for now?
Ms. Hallenbeck: It depends on what kind of line that it is.
Mr. Haines: Let’s just say it is a Grounds line.
Ms. Hallenbeck: If it is the State side, we don’t see any change in that fringe. If it is a DIFR line, when I capture the salary savings it is calculated with fringe, so that would go into our fringe target at the end of the year. If it is an IFR line, we capture the savings without fringe.
Mr. Haines: So, maybe we can’t. Let’s say we have 50 lines that are DIFR and IFR and 50
lines that are State lines that are not currently filled. Wouldn’t we temporarily benefit from
moving them over because then you are not paying the fringe.
Ms. Hallenbeck: Well that affects us in another way though. Then we would be effecting our
central reserves bottom line because our fringe overflow at the end of the year could be less then if we left the lines.
Mr. Haines: What does the fringe overflow mean?
Ms. Hallenbeck: We get a certain target we have to hit for fringe every year, anything beyond that come back to campus at the end of the year and it currently goes back into our Central Reserves and it is used to balance our budget.
Dr. Copelton: I am looking at your requests, giving the context of discussions about what is
available in reserves and what is not. Compared to the other division presentations, your total is higher and I am wondering how realistic these requests are and what are the consequences if these are not funded.
Mr. Spiro: This is a total “nice to have” in the next three to five years. That’s pretty important if we want to continue doing what we are doing and do it better. Obviously we have survived this far and I am pessimistic on how well we are doing. It is not that the people in the division are not trying; there just aren’t enough people to get the work done. That is very hard on our people and I am sure it is hard on the people we are serving. Can it be continued, sure, but again that it is not making it a great place to work for the people working here and not serving the people we are trying to serve. With that said, whatever we can get to improve this is greatly appreciated. Obviously, we are not going to get everything that we asked for.
Dr. Wilson: There are a lot of funded vacant lines. So, there are lines with funding attached that have not been filled from that division that could go back.
Dr. Copelton: Funded positions within Administration and Finance where money could be
shifted over to the lines that Mr. Spiro is requesting?
Mr. Spiro: We have about 23 lines worth a million dollars that are sitting unfilled in our
division. Those are college lines, they don’t “belong to us”, but they happened to have been in
our division before. It comes down to what are we trying to accomplish as a total institution and how much of that might be used in our division.
Dr. Copelton: So would the money to fund these positions come out of the staff salary pool?
Mr. Spiro: Absolutely.
Dr. Copelton: I guess I wanted some clarification then because so many of the discussions up
until this point have reiterated that there is no money in that pool.
Mr. Spiro: I think that has been a definitional problem. Technically, no there isn’t any money
because if that position used to belong to a department and hasn’t been labeled as a vacant line, it is not totally free money. For all practical purposes, it is base money since it hasn’t been allocated and it hasn’t been requested. So, yes there are a lot of base dollars it is just attached to someone who isn’t here anymore.
Dr. Copelton: The base dollars are there and they have been allocated, they just haven’t been
spent essentially.
Mr. Spiro: Technically, they aren’t even allocated. There is a line that is funded but there is no one on it. For all practical purposes, we could say for campus wide any line that is
permanently funded and is not currently being searched just eliminate them and just say whatever we might have, 45 lines and 2 million dollars. That is base, it is just marked in
different ways so it doesn’t look like there is base, but there really is.
Dr. Singh: I have a specific question about the procurement platform, for which a line is being requested. When this was introduced to this committee, it was indicated to us that it would create long-term savings for the institution. Has there been an estimate? Can someone provide us as a committee an estimate of what savings have been garnered and the request for a full-time position, I was surprised and just want to add to the discussion?
Mr. Spiro: I am not sure how much savings have been obtained so far because I am not sure it has been fully implemented. In addition, to that system being implemented the nature of contracts for everything that comes through right now, even if we are doing that system, is much more complex.
Dr. Wilson: On salary savings, whether it is faculty pool or staff pool, it usually takes a
minimum of six months to fill a position. We constantly have money sitting there. Whereas what we are talking about in Administration & Finance is in recent years that division has really been decimated. There are so many positions that are unfilled that people can’t get their jobs done. Some of the stuff is not on the listing at all and there are lines sitting out there that should have been filled two years ago. That is my opinion and I am from another division.
Dr. Copelton: So I am curious, what is the normal process for making those requests and filling those lines out of the staff salary pool because it seems to me like that these should have been filled two years ago and they haven’t been. So, what is the process through which that normally occurs?
Mr. Spiro: Right now, we are going through a similar but parallel process in terms of assessing requests at President’s Cabinet.
Mr. Mihalyov: Generally, the past couple of years, we have had a quarterly review of position requests. If a line goes vacant, unless it is considered an emergency fill, you have to wait until the next review period to request that the line gets filled.
Mr. Spiro: These positions were not requested.
Dr. Copelton: That was my question. So, there was no request put into Cabinet to refill these
positions.
Mr. Spiro: Correct.
Ms. Hallenbeck: Or there was one situation where a search failed so it was a reorganization of duties to see if it works.
Dr. Bhadury: We have roughly three million dollars in reserves from salary savings and other savings that have been noted. We might add to those reserves and we probably will if the tuition increase goes through. Of the three million dollars, if the new contract is signed and the maintenance of effort money does not come from Albany, a one-time hit of six percent plus a continuing additional expense adds up to a million dollars. The requests that have come from all of the divisions account add up to about $1.2 million. So, approximately $2.2 million out of the three million dollars if all of these requests were granted by the President’s Cabinet, leaving us with right now $800,000 in reserves. To which will get added whatever institutional overflow from the increase.
Dr. Reiner: Wouldn’t the promised salary increases for people who haven’t received raises be
part of that too?
Ms. Hallenbeck: The faculty would be different. I believe that is a different process.
Dr. Bhadury: Faculty/Staff salary will come out of Academic Affairs funds.
Dr. Copelton: If that happens and the contract says, there is a percentage increase then it is
going to increase the actual amount that we need to come up going forward, right?
Mr. Spiro: There are a lot of things going on the same time and we have to figure out what
happens and what works.
Ms. Hallenbeck: So faculty raises are funded from Central Reserves but all of the other pieces currently, like if there is a salary equity adjustment, the talk is to have them come out of the faculty salary pool.
Dr. Bhadury: Of which, as Dr. Haynes said last time, he has slightly less than a million.
Other Items from the Committee
Dr. Copelton discussed the upcoming meetings:
- April 26th meeting will have presentations by Residential Life, BASC, and BSG
- May 3rd meeting has a main agenda item to create a response from the committee to the various division presentations that we have heard. This would be a report that will be given to Cabinet. Members should email Dr. Copelton prior to this meeting, their thoughts and what members feel are priority on the presentations so that she can begin to compile them.
The meeting was adjourned at 10:30 a.m.
Next Meeting: April 26, 2018, 8:30-10:30 AM;
Presentations by: Residential Life, BASC, & BSG
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