Excused: Eva Gonzales, Ana Rodriguez

Absent: Jean Mason, Deborah Buenger

Guests: Provost Meredith Hay, Alexis Blue (Univ Communications)

Opening Announcements – Randy Livingston - we are looking to put a newsletter together and put it out electronically: food drive, cats in the community March 7^th with Project YES with book drive, due date of Feb 1^st. Pictures of events with who is in it and what it is. Claudia needs to get a list of upcoming activities.

Upcoming items sign up for Cats in Community, Supervisors breakfast in May, Tri-board meeting at ASU joint meeting) in spring, Education fair, Article in the paper regarding AZ Daily Star did research on salary ranges, Letter from staff person about the article on salaries and Dr Sheltons response in letter, food drive successful and to be repeated in the spring, etc possible stuff the cat tran, similar programs for the community should notify community relations with the info, retreat in July, nomination of officers.

Provost Meredith Hay - budget updates, She and Shelton met with the presidents, staff and Regents. FY 09 and 10: absolute lack of clarity but have some info. Tone is a system wide discussion. 2+ billion shortfall would potentially be dire. New governor very different and interested in cutting. Strategy is one of collaboration. Driven by revenues so less from state means more from tuition. Napolitano asked regents to give back 5% across the board for 09. Not across the board for 10 due to transformation plans. Allows release from out of state cap during difficult financial times and allows for more fees allowing us to restructure our costs...differential tuition, masters fees, etc. Implementation of transformation plan with staff participation, consolidations will move forward. Undergraduate and graduate program review to use our time and resources more efficiently. Lean 6 sigma manufacturing efficiency improvements by analyzing and improving systems started in October - internal team goes into units for 3 days and already on pcard management, hiring, and merges. Suggest Allison Vaillancourt and Linda Heffernan come to present how this is done. Centralization of IT, campus committee of 20. Program closures ongoing. Best case scenario is an additional 10% which is good as state is at a 30% loss. Regents will be looking for state cash and if units holding money they should spend their cash...no carry overs. Deans have permission to spend on teaching, safety, compliance. Survival will be based on enrollment and fees (revenue). Ideas or savings should be forwarded to provost or presidents office. Ramping up the 2+2 model to allow 2 years transferable college credits to 2 years at universities...cheaper and allows for better education. Changes to QTR, qualified tuition reduction , is being discussed but not first choice as it is the one incentive for keeping our staff members. Reduction in hours is still being looked at unit by unit rather than outright layoff. Concern about academic advising as units are losing them across campus and is there a centralized awareness of a possible shortage for campus as a whole. Believe conversations are ongoing and this issue and its hard to believe it would lead to a drastic reduction rather a more efficient professional advising system. Main functions of deans office is hiring, purchasing, grant transactions and cuts will be revisited with less structure...more centralized efforts.

Diana Rix spoke on doing a education fair in March cosponsored with outreach office. Evening weekend campus, etc ways of getting education. Someone from financial aid should be available to walk us through the pitfalls. Someone from Pima to also help with transfer info. Also have workshops on continuing education after the fair. UA South to be included. Diana, Lili, Shana, Maria. Lili will be writing something up on change of conference to job fair this year.

Old Main has a room for February 3^rd meeting. Mirror lab for March 3.

Meeting Close

Wrap-up – Randy Livingston

Meeting adjourned at 4:15 pm

Respectfully Submitted by Grace Aranda