EDITORIAL: Nassau Community College makes prudent fiscal choices

Tough times make for difficult fiscal choices, and the proposed Nassau Community College budget that the county legislature begins examining today seems to offer just about the right level of prudence.

To begin with, the college has to cope every year with a structural cost growth, from employee contracts and other inexorably rising items, of $10 million or more. And the state has cut its support and is expected to cut it some more.

Yet its proposed 2011 budget of almost $203 million is $1.2 million less than the one the county adopted for 2010. (But, due to savings in the current budget, it's about $1 million more than the college estimates it will spend in the current budget year.)

To craft a no-tax-increase budget, the college had to make cuts of $6.7 million and use $2.2 million from its reserves. The cuts include slightly larger class sizes, elimination of vacant union and administrative positions, elimination of administrative raises, and pulling back from the planned lease of a building on Stewart Avenue that would have been more accessible for registrations and other student needs.

The budget also proposes a tuition increase of $110 a year, to $3,732. Technically, though the legislators vote on the total budget, not tuition, they'll inevitably focus on that increase. As they deliberate, they might want to think about the vexing county budget that they have to adopt later this year - and see the college's proposal as a good model. hN