CMC President's Board of Trustee's recap and news for September 2024

Hi folks. Daren Otten here. This is an update associated with your board meetings from last week. We had two of them, two special meetings.

As a reminder, the second one did take place in lieu of the one that was canceled for this week. So again, there is no board meeting this week. Both of them were last week and they started off at 9 a.m. last week on the fifth, with the Board of Trustees interviewing three candidates to be considered for the provisional appointment for District Four trustee. And so that was Liz Myers seat.

As most of you are aware, Liz Meyer resigned from the board back in July specifically to go travel the world, and that left a vacancy that ultimately the Board of Trustees filled this last week. And I want to just kind of acknowledge that it’s pretty awesome that we live in a community, that we get so much interest of people who want to serve and support the college. And in this particular case, we had three people who were interviewed by the board to be considered for this appointment. And so those people were Randy Council, Chuck Uyeda, and Kathy Inscore. And each one of them brought some amazing community service, in some cases, Copper Mountain College service, and really passion for the students in our community. And it was very difficult for the board to ultimately make a decision on who they wanted to appoint.

In the end, they did choose Chuck Uyeda specifically to be the representative for the District Four trustee seat that now runs through the balance of Liz’s term, which is in December of 2026. So that seat will be on the ballot in 2026. And whether or not trustee decides to run or not, he can make that decision at that time. But at this point, he is now the provisional trustee for that area and was sworn in at the beginning of the general meeting, which started at 10:30 that particular morning. So coming out of the closed session, there was no action that I asked the board to take.

And so we moved into the general meeting. And really the first thing that was going on was the oath of office specifically for new Trustee Uyeda. But then we moved into the general reports. And of course, really a lot of the reports and words that were said were in memory of Jim Pulliam, Roger Wagner and Jerry Garber. I don’t think there was anybody that was in that room that day that didn’t have a story about one or all of those gentlemen and their impact on our community and on our college. It was truly a sad time, and it continues to be a sad time, as we all reflect on the contributions that those three individuals made.

And yet today we get an opportunity to see at the Scholarship Breakfast so many of the students that were impacted by the Pulliam Leadership Scholarship and discussions about how there may be additional scholarships in the names of these gentlemen.

Moving on from the general reports, there was a Star award, Jasmine Schaffer. Congratulations. Pretty exciting that we got to acknowledge Jasmine and then moved into several updates around accreditation.

A reminder about our special Joint Board meeting with MUSD, which is preceding the October 10th board meeting, which starts at 1 p.m. and then moving into many of the kind of normal consent items, part time faculty appointments, etc. the action that the board did take is that the board has affirmed the 2024 Board of Trustees annual goals and the 2024 Superintendent/President annual goals. And so, at this point, with the affirmation of those particular goals, those will be disseminated throughout the campus. And as we work to align everything that we do associated with the board goals, we will continue to, you know, execute on their kind of the North Star that they set for us as a as a campus and as a college.

There were several other action items coming through human resources, a couple amendment contracts, a faculty reassignment. But the big item that was then of interest to everyone was the 20 2425 budget. So Meredith presented the 2024-25 budget. And, well, it’s as close to balanced as possible. We’ve done so with the hard work of all of you to get to a place where, you know, again, our our revenue is slightly less than our expenditures, but that’s really where we expected. And we did. And I want to be clear that we booked the deficit factors that the State of California has applied to us at this point.

Now, hopefully the State of California makes that up. But the good news is, is that we are essentially balanced where we will be for the next couple of years, though, as we do anticipate that we will be spending more than we actually generate for at least the next couple of years. And that’s been planned. But that’s part of why we have reserves, where we have reserves as we look to pace ultimately our expenditures with our revenues. And so we will get there. But, you know, we’ve got some time that we need to build enrollments back in our fall. Enrollments are looking very, very strong. And so that was a really a good budget presentation from Meredith, highlighting the fact that for the first time in the history of the college, the. liabilities are fully funded or Fund 41 facilities liabilities are fully funded.

Ultimately, our STRS and PERS set asides are there for retiree benefits. And this is something that, again, has taken a lot of dedicated, intentional efforts to get to so that we can ensure the financial security of the district long term. So I do want to thank everyone because I know that, you know, there’s always challenges with fiscal conversations and dollars and cents and everything else. But the point is, is that together, we’ve been able to put the college in a place where we have essentially a balanced budget, and yet we’ve addressed the needs of our employees, the needs of our students and the needs of our future. And so for that, I want to thank everybody and their hard work, and we’ll continue to, you know, go down that path of ensuring fiscal sustainability for the district.

As the board meeting wrapped up. Board President, Trustee Gilbert did adjourn the meeting, ultimately in the memory of Jim Pulliam, Roger Wagner and Jerry Garber, and noted that they were truly folks who’ve left an indelible mark on our college and are going to all be missed.

We’ll see you next month.