During Thursday’s Board of Trustees meeting, Trustee Bill Montgomery, questioned why a monthly budget was not already implemented in the process.
Board members exchanged views on the issue of having an updated budget report yearly, instead of monthly. This caused many issues in the previous year, mainly not knowing if the university was overspending until after all the money was spent and there was nothing left to be done.
“I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that we have a system that you can’t put together a monthly budget,” said Montgomery.
Trustee Bruce Langos, commented on the importance of having a monthly budget report.
“If you aren’t doing monthly financials, then the data is highly suspect… It isn’t transparent. More importantly, it isn’t transparent to the department heads who need to be managing the budget,” said Langos.
Walt Branson, chief business officer, explained the difficulty of giving a monthly budget report due to time constraint and limited resources.
“We’ve gone through generations of boards who allow that kind of behavior to continue to where we are now,” said Langos.
Doug Fecher, trustee, argued about the importance of having a monthly budget report. He explained the need to have a monthly report so the university can be aware of overspending before it is too late.
Fecher also mentioned that this problem was one of the reasons Wright State went through the previous financial crisis. Currently there are more controls in place to keep everything more organized, accessible and easily manageable.
Board members disclosed information regarding the way committees resolve lack of funding issues.
According to John Shipely, committees are moving money from one category to another in order to cover funds. These actions were argued upon during this meeting but will be revisited at a later time.
A number of contracts were approved with different monetary amounts ranging from $150,000-500,000 and over. Some of the larger contracts included interstate gas supply, educational computer systems and DELL.
The next Board of Trustees Committee Day meeting is Dec. 12 at 11 a.m. in 156 Student Union.
