Recent Budget Reductions
May 29, 2009
To the Georgia Tech campus community:
As was announced earlier this morning, the state of Georgia has seen precipitous declines in monthly revenue collections, ranging from 20-35 percent in monthly revenues over a year-to-year basis. These are substantial and largely unprecedented, and we are being told that this lingering economic effect is similar to what is occurring around the nation. The most recent revenue figures for the month of May 2009 have forced the state to take action to preserve a balanced budget for the current fiscal year. As a result, earlier this week the governor requested that all state agencies, including the University System of Georgia, make additional reductions to their annual state budgets.
Here at Georgia Tech, we have been carefully monitoring the situation and while this latest reduction brings our projected cumulative budget reduction to nearly 14 percent for this past and the next fiscal year, we believe that we have developed a strategy for dealing with this reduction.
Because we are so close to the end of the fiscal year, we will again attempt to manage this latest reduction centrally, and will not require any immediate unit-level reductions. However, as we plan for the future, we will need to remain cautious and work together to ensure that the decisions we make in the coming weeks with respect to the FY10 budget and beyond, protect our core academic and research mission.
I know these are difficult times and I want to thank the entire Georgia Tech community — faculty, staff, students, and alumni — for your understanding and assistance as we continue to face these ongoing challenges. Georgia Tech has demonstrated its tremendous resilience in the past, and we will continue to seek out cost efficiencies and other means to ensure that we are able to educate and serve the citizens of Georgia as a top-tier research university.
Regards,
G. P. "Bud" Peterson
President
