GENERAL PROVISIONS FOR RETRENCHMENT OF EMPLOYES
§ 155.1. Generally.
(a) The costs of operating the Pennsylvania State Colleges are generated through essentially four sources: salaries paid and benefits provided for all state college employes; instructional and nonstructional supplies and materials; physical plant maintenance; and specialized auxilliary operations such as student residence halls and campus dining services. Within any stated time period, when these costs are greater than revenues received, the colleges are obligated to bring total expenditures and total revenues into balance.
(b) As of the present time, anticipated expenditures by the state colleges for fiscal years 1975-1976 and 1976-1977 will exceed their anticipated revenues from all sources. This judgment is based upon an extrapolation to 1976-1977 of the current levels and probably rates of increase of costs of current services and supplies, together with a forecast of probable total revenues available throught 1976-1977.
(c) The state colleges cannot risk a delay until next year to initiate a process that will more likely assure the achievement of a balance of revenues and expenses during 1976-1977. A college is a very complex institution to reorganize within a framework of declining capability to finance a group of services and programs. Such a reorganization is a particularly difficult challenge if the college attempts to retain its academic strength and guard its future while simultaneously ‘‘laying off’’ staff, reducing services, and ‘‘scrimping’’ on supplies. But this is the challenge for the state colleges.
(d) Because of the difficult decisions that must be made, and because of the state colleges’ contractual obligations to inform employes by specified calendar dates of the termination of their services, the process of planning for retrenchment at the state colleges must begin immediately, and the decisions resulting from the planning process must be announced formally by September 8, 1975.
(e) For the past two years, the colleges have operated with austerity or semi-austerity budgets. They have sacrificed their supplies and materials inventories and deferred and cancelled physical plant maintenance to a point that neither of these two sources of expenditures represents a significant level of potential cost savings in future years. In fact, further attempts at major savings in these areas may extensively damage the physical and educational resources of the colleges. While a reduction in the auxiliary services offered by a college might result in cost savings, this, too, appears to be of very limited potential for achieving balanced budgets for fiscal years 1975-1976 and 1976-1977.
(f) These regulations are intended primarily to assist the president of each college in the process of determining which positions in the college should be abolished and how the decisions should be made about specific employes who are to be ‘‘laid off.’’ There has already been significant experience at each college in reducing nonpersonnel associated costs. Employe layoff decisions are, unquestionably, the most difficult to make. These regulations, hopefully, will allow the appropriate retrenchment judgments to be made in a manner that reduces as much as possible the inevitably adverse effects of such decisions upon each college.
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