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Dear Superintendent/President Dr. Serban, and other undersigned of your Oct 9 email to the campus.

As budget analyst and chief negotiator for the IA and regular attendee at the meetings of the Board of Trustees, I would like to respond to your letter. I am an instructor of accounting and as such familiar with accounting rules and regulations. I will provide additional detail and documents (see attachment) supporting the budget related statements made by the IA Executive Board in our endorsement message. You will see that every statement is documented and accurate.

Our statement: The board has repeatedly accepted misleading budget figures from the District. Deferred payments were misrepresented: accrual accounting and cash accounting were inappropriately mixed to give a misleading picture of our ending balances. Those knowledgeable in reading financial reports should have picked up on this gross abuse of accounting techniques. However the Trustees - even those with decades of board experience - did not question the numbers they were given.
 
Board members were mislead to the extent that they got caught in very embarrassing situations when talking to the public. For example, on June 22, Trustee Dr. Dobbs at a meeting with students insisted that one month missed payments by the state due to a late budget would leave us short $11M cash. He said Trustees “were told” so - when in reality those monthly payments average only about  $4.5M. Please be assured that the IA is not questioning the skills, professionalism and credibility of our highly qualified accounting staff and managers under the leadership of Joe Sullivan and Leslie Griffin. At issue is HOW the accounting information generated by them is presented to the board and to the public. Departing from past practice, only very limited information is given to board members. Board members are not provided with line item budgets but only summaries of the major budget categories. Cash and accrual accounting techniques are inappropriately mixed when numbers are presented. Those figures are then used in justifying course cuts. Please see examples in the attached documentation file. 
 
Our Statement: This fall, facing a serious electoral challenge to the incumbent Trustees, the college hired a PR consultant, to be paid $24,000 out of the General Fund. This money could have been used to fund the tutoring hours that had been eliminated in the last budget. In fact, this money would have paid for over two thousand hours of tutoring for our students. The Trustees approved this expenditure without questioning it.

SBCC employs several highly qualified full time staff in the area of Public Relations: i.e. a Public Information Officer, a Public Relations Specialist for Continuing Education and a Director of Marketing and Publications (http://sbcc.edu/presidentsoffice/orgcharts.php). They have won statewide awards and the college has every reason to be proud of them, We also have an outstanding communications department with more than a dozen excellent full and part time faculty who are experts in the field of communications (http://sbcc.edu/communication/index.php).

In short: SBCC has their own PR specialists on staff, there is no reason to spend $24,000 on an outside PR consultant in times when classes are cut.

The contract form for this consultant was completed in July. An attempt to have this consultant paid by the SBCC Foundation failed, because the Foundation declined to pay such an expenditure – a wise decision. The Board then approved the use of General Fund money to pay for the consultant. By the time the board approved hiring the consultant on Sept 23, 2010 about one third of the amount had already been spent.  (See also documentation file.) 

Our Statement: At the Board meeting of September 23, the Board was asked to vote on the adopted budget. The budget increased the transfer to the equipment fund by $3,700,000. Trustee Alexander asked for an itemization. She said that if money was to be taken away from our student programs, she wanted to know . There was no itemization! She proposed an amendment to the budget, leaving this money in the General Fund until we had a budget from Sacramento and we could see what choices needed to be made. There was no second to her motion for amendment.

This can be verified by consulting the audio transcript of the September Board Meeting: http://wfs.sbcc.edu/projects/audio/bot_current_meeting.mp3

The Board approved the budget despite of unanswered questions and further need of discussion by their own members.

A final point:  On Oct 4 the IA had officially requested a printout of all college revenue and expense items detailed by account for the past four academic years*, i.e. of existing information. After two follow up emails and a personal appeal to the Board of Trustees, this information is now promised for Oct 28 -  more than three weeks after our request. However, last fall, the  Accreditation team was told that our system is “successful in providing (…) up-to-date financial reports”  and that “current financial information is readily(!)  available to the campus community.”  (http://sbcc.edu/accreditation/files/SBCCInstitutionalSelfStudy.pdf, p. 73, 344)

Please review the attached documentation and feel free to contact me, in case you are in need of additional explanation or documentation.

Executive Board, SBCC Instructors’ Association
Cornelia Alsheimer

* as well as some other information items