FY 2025-26 Draft Operating Budget - Community Comments
Western Community Feedback
The university welcomes input from members of the Western community on the FY2025-26 Draft Budget Recommendation. To help us ensure the most useful and transparent discussion possible, we encourage comments that:
- Identify specific areas of the budget that could be clarified or improved.
- Point out any gaps or areas of concern you believe may have been overlooked.
- Ask questions that may be shared by the broader university community.
Comments can be submitted by anyone with a Western account and usernames are automatically associated with comments. The feedback will shared with President's Cabinet before the budget recommendation is finalized. The comment period was open through June 10th and is now closed. The submitted comments will be shared with university leadership before the Budget Recommendation is presented to the Board of Trustees on June 13, 2025
NOTE: Comments do not appear immediately after submission. All comments have to be approved and posted by a moderator before they appear on the webpage. The moderator will not approve comments that contain any harmful, threatening, defamatory or hateful speech or that are offensive in nature. Submitted comments that do not pertain to the budget recommendation will not be approved by the moderator. If you have any questions as to why your comment was not posted, you may email Strategy, Management & Budget at SMB@wwu.edu and we will respond as soon as feasible.
Comments
Opportunity for WWU Leadership to take furloughs
Similar to what we are seeing in Bellingham Schools and other organizations, I think it would go a long way if WWU Leadership took even a few furlough days. At the highest salary levels, even a few furlough days per administrator could potentially save a lot. I think this move also has symbolic importance for faculty, staff, and students who are making much greater sacrifices in the face of our current budget crisis.
Additionally, I believe that very few staff need to be 100% FTE for the entire summer. As an academic institution, we should be honest about our staffing needs throughout the summer months.
ASWWU Perspective on Budget Deficit
Christopher Rosenquist, on behalf of the ASWWU: I want to first thank the Director of Government Relations Nora Selander and WWU for their ongoing support of student endeavors and ensuring that WWU is fully funded. The ASWWU continues to support cost-saving measures that are deemed absolutely necessary and preferably through reductions in redundant services, though we are well aware that the number of those redundancies is getting smaller. Sustainable state and federal appropriations continue to elude full funding, and we recognize the difficult choices that are being made, but we continue to encourage WWU’s full support for students and student workers. It is crucial that WWU advocates for its academic programs in the foreseeable future to ensure a thriving academic environment for current and prospective students. To this end we support the exemption of academic departments from non-labor reductions given their budgets are already too small. Though this must not come at the cost of critical student support services that are already overworked like the Counseling and Wellness Center. We also would urge the WWU Board of Trustees to prioritize Western's flagship campus in Bellingham while preserving only necessary and efficient programs at its other smaller locations. The ASWWU strongly recommends a strategy in which WWU administration consistently works with and seeks feedback from student leaders regarding ongoing budget challenges. This will be crucial to identifying creative solutions to the large budget deficit and ensuring that other funding sources that cannot be cut are not cut. While we understand the need to have a healthy source of reserve funding, it cannot be achieved by forcing upon WWU a bare bones strategy which will make it harder to identify and operationalize efficiencies while supporting students.