[Speaker 2] Afternoon, I hereby call to order this budget workshop meeting of the Board of Regents on July 23rd, 2026 at 4 p.m. We do have a quorum, and so our next item of business is workshop, fiscal year 2027 budget. President Atkin. [Speaker 1] There we go, and to really discuss many of the changes that we made to our budget in order to account for the decline in revenue due to changes in state appropriations. So just a reminder, in terms of ad valorem tax, we still have not received certified rolls from either Chambers County or Harris County. Chambers County is scheduled to deliver those by the end of July. We have not received them as of today, and Harris County is always very slow. Typically, we're getting those at or around the time that we're having our board meeting in August, and so we get very little leeway with Harris County. Our schedule going forward on August 20th, we will bring the final budget to the board for approval, and then the tax rate adoption process will start in September. So let's talk about proposed revenues. In summary, we, based on our current property valuations received in April, expect to see an increase in district taxes of $776,000. Now, part of that is a shift from district taxes INS rates, right? So INS goes down based on our payment schedule. Next year, it's gonna pop back up, but that allows some of those funds to be used in M&O taxes if we maintain the same total tax rate. So we're projecting $776,000 increase in M&O taxes, keeping the same rate next year that we have this year. We have always collected money from past due taxes each year, but for whatever reason, we've never budgeted for that as a potential revenue stream. So part of the reason that you see every single year that our M&O taxes are coming in above projected budget is because we've never budgeted for collection of outstanding past due taxes. We've already collected over 700,000 this year. We feel that 650,000 is a conservative estimate for what we'll collect next year, but we feel it's appropriate to start including that in our projected budget each year. And again, our payment schedule on our debt is down this year, but it jumps back up next year. So there'll be a shift next year from M&O taxes to INS taxes within the same stated tax rate. Revenue in lieu of taxes has gone down slightly. We have talked at length about why state appropriation taxes have gone down so significantly. Tuition and fees have gone up a little bit. And really, there are a number of things that go into that calculation. I'll share that a little bit later. And then our interest income continues to decline as rates stay flat or start to drop. So let's talk about ad valorem tax. Part of the reason that we're not asking you to approve a budget today is because there's so much fluctuation in property valuation estimates from April, when we get our initial valuations from the counties to the actual certified rolls. And that's not necessarily the fault of the taxing districts. You know, you have all of the appeals that have to be accounted for, and there are property valuations that are still in flux. So you can see last year, right, Chambers County started at 6.7 million, ended at 7.2. Harris County started at 14.9, ended at 14.3. We're not sure how property valuations are gonna change by the time we get to August of next year. And because our budget is so tight, we really are hoping to wait until we get those certified rolls before finalizing the budget. Here you can see the breakdown of taxes, both in terms of the associated rate with M&O, as well as the interest in sinking, with, again, a projected increase of $1.1 million, including collections from past due taxes. Moving on to state appropriations. Again, the $3.8 million decline is a result of three major changes. The first one is one credential per category per student during a five-year period, which means a student can earn one level one certification, and we get paid for that, but if they earn a second or a third, those don't qualify for compensation. This is particularly painful for us when it comes to our students at Huntsville. Most of our students who are pursuing certificates earn more than one. And when we used to get paid for all of the certificates that they earned, now we only get paid for one. The second change that they made was with regard to the weights. Students academically underprepared, economically disadvantaged, and over the age of 25 moved from 25, 25, 50 to 20, 20, 40, that we have the third highest number of students that qualify for a weight advantage, and so that impacted us significantly. And then the state simply prorated all of the payments to tie to the budget that the legislature actually passed for this year, which is actually $81 million less than what they approved for FY26, and so we took another hit for that, our proportionate share of that decline. Yes, sir. So what they did is they reduced those weights. So if we had a student that was academically underprepared, economically disadvantaged, and over the age of 25, almost every single inmate in Huntsville hits all three of those requirements, right? We would get paid 100% more for their credential. So if we're getting $3,500 for an associate's degree with all of the weights, we were getting paid $7,000 for the degree. Now instead of getting 100% increase if they qualify for all three, we're only getting an 80% increase. So that's just essentially a 20% reduction in the payments that we receive for any student that qualified under one of those three specific weights. Now the reason that those weights exist is quite logical, right? So there's lots of data that shows that students in any one of those three categories have a more difficult time completing. It means that in order for them to be successful, in order for us to help them be successful, they need more support services. It's more expensive to help them reach completion of their credential of value, right? That's the theory behind the weights. Reducing the amounts doesn't have anything to do with what it actually costs to try and educate those students. This was simply a cost savings measure, right? So all of the data and the reason that those things existed in the first place, nothing with regard to that has changed. It's just how they were trying to reduce the amount of the total allocations due to community colleges, since we had exceeded the budget allotted by the legislature by such a significant amount. All right. Pro-ration. This includes those formulaic changes plus the pro-ration of the $81 million cut in funding. And you can see that these changes do not have very equitable effects across colleges in the state of Texas. For us, our funding dropped by 19.9%. You know, if you take an institution like San Jack, you know, adjacent to us, their funding only dropped by 7.8%. And that's a reflection of our student body and the way that they complete, what they're completing and how they qualify for those different weight measures. And so this has been a painful change for us. On the bright side, this type of correction right here resets. We're not expecting funding to go down in the future. And this mechanism of just pro-rating and allocating the funds that the legislature's actually allocated means that we won't see big cuts like this again in the future. Not unless the total funding to community colleges is cut by the legislature. Moving on to tuition and fees. As you know, the governor has frozen tuition and fees for, I think this is the third year in a row. That is a topic of discussion amongst boards all across the state, whether or not he actually is allowed to freeze tuition and fees under the law. And that's not just a concern that some of you have raised, that's being raised all across the state. And so it will be a point of legislative advocacy this spring as we go into the legislative session. However, since we don't expect a significant change in our enrollments, we haven't really made too many changes to our budget as with regard to tuition and fees. The one major change that you see there is with regard to tuition waivers. The drop from 1.3 million to 1 million is simply a reflection of our historical trend regarding how much we've actually been applying in tuition waivers. So we've been over budgeting that. $1 million is closer to what we actually waive each year in tuition and fees, which gives us a little more flexibility in the total amount of our budget. Two significant changes that you need to be aware of. As mentioned in a past board meeting, Huffman has decided to move their dual credit to San Jack. So we lost between 165 and 180 students for dual credit. We have added the associates degree, the academic associates degree at Huntsville. We expect between 150 and 200 students per semester to be enrolled in the dual credit. And we expect to see an increase in the number of students enrolled in that program this year. And so those reasonably offset one another in terms of our total enrollments. At present, the way that it's tracking our enrollment here on main campus is down 6% right now, but a lot of that is timing. And we're not too worried about that until we get midway through August in terms of our enrollment numbers. The same as they were frozen by the governor. So no particular change there. Other revenues. So we have workforce, CE revenues, other revenues, which you can see the list there, and then interest income. That's been very consistent for us over the past several years. We only expect a slight decline due to changes in our interest income. So in summary, our revenue budget dropped from 86.6 million to 83.9 million, or a $2.7 million deficit that we have to address by cutting expenses this year. And that's assuming that we keep the same tax rate and that the property valuations are fairly accurate based on the estimates that we received in April. If we see big swings in property valuations, we'll be going back to the drawing board to find some additional cuts. So let's talk about proposed expenses this year. Of our four main categories, salaries, benefits, operating debt for bonds, and debt for leases, we are cutting salaries and benefits 183,000. Now, I'll go into more detail there. We had to cut a lot more than 183,000, but benefits went up across the state, and so we had to account for the increase in benefits with some reduction in our total number of positions. Our operating expenses, we cut by two million. And then our debt, we don't have the flexibility to adjust our debt. That's just a reflection of the change in our debt schedules. So let's talk about salaries. Here is the true reflection of where we made significant cuts. So you can see salaries, faculty, stipends, salary service staff, part-time salaries. We had significant cuts in several of those categories. And if you look at benefits, benefits are doing the opposite, right? We had to cut all of our salaries, but benefits have gone up almost across the board. So to kind of summarize what we've done, we have still budgeted a 3% COLA increase for all employees. We have covered the $450,000 increase in state-mandated benefits. We are maintaining the 8% vacancy savings rate that we used last year. You've noticed our budget for salaries has been really close every single month. We feel like that's been a good estimate. We're gonna maintain that 8%. We eliminated $1.6 million in positions. And if you look at the appendix, page A1, you can see a list of all the positions that we cut as part of this process. We did have to add a few new positions, mostly at Huntsville, right? We're adding the AA program. We needed to add faculty to cover that. We needed to add another academic advisor as students can't register for classes on their own. The academic advisor has to help with every single student in getting them enrolled for classes. So we did have to add some positions at Huntsville. We decreased stipends and overtime. And while I would like to increase this more, right now we're budgeting an additional $50,000 for student employment. And where we would really like to go is get another 450,000 into student employment on top of this. So hopefully property values are even better than what we're expecting. We can address some of these things. As far as other operating expenses go, you can see this list. There are only a few of these items that I wanna talk about specifically as it relates to the changes from 26 to 27. Some of these are just looking at our spending and identifying areas where we can trim the $20,000, $50,000 type cuts. The big ones that I wanna talk about, first on our scholarships, we reduced scholarships by 251,000 Now that sounds like we're really cutting the services to our students, but we're not. If you remember last year, we were worried that the federal government was gonna cut C-Campus or funding for daycare for our students. So we moved extra money. We moved $350,000 into C-Campus to help pay for that. Well, months later, the federal government came through and ended up funding that. And so a large portion of what we're cutting right here is a reduction of that C-Campus funding since that was already being funded by the federal government. We are going to have enough money in there to continue to provide daycare support to all of our students who have requested that based on last year's activity. The other items, learning frameworks, we're eliminating that program. This summer, we had such low enrollment in that that it doesn't make prudent sense for us to continue that program. So we have a few savings there. And then with Huntsville MyBooks, there were some structural changes that we made in that program. And so we're not cutting that service to our students. We're just correcting a structural issue that we had so that we saved a little bit of money there. And so that's some information on our scholarship reduction. From a budgetary perspective, we saved 250,000. In terms of the services that we provide our students, there are essentially no cuts to the service to our students, only reallocations. The other one that I wanna talk about is the elimination of our insurance reserve payment. So each year, we have been allocating between 800,000 and a million dollars into our insurance reserves. And we do that because we do not carry catastrophic named storm insurance, right? So if we're hit by a hurricane and it does significant damage to the facility, we have to cover that on our own. Our current insurance coverage will not pay for that. Now, over the decades of history that we have on this campus, we've never had major damage from a named storm. We didn't have any during Ike. We didn't have really any damage during Harvey. And in working with our insurance adjusters, the maximum projected damage that they would expect on our campus based on our history and the past storms that we've had in this area is $14 million. Now, we have far more than that already in reserves with the board, right? So if there was an actuarial based type damage event to our campus, we already have enough funding to cover that. With our insurance reserves and the reserves that we've already set aside, currently, based on the proposed budget for next year, we have over five months of reserves. We're only required to have four months of reserves and even four months is very good compared to our peers who rely more on cash on hand than truly dedicated reserves like we have in order to demonstrate that they have cash solvency. And so I do not believe that it is prudent for us to continue to put money into an insurance reserve and just have that cash balance continue to grow. We need to put that money to work for us now as much this year as any, but our reserves are very good and I'm very confident with how much money we've set aside and four months would be fine with me. We're already to five months and I'm not proposing that we reduce that amount, just that there's no need for us to continue to contribute to it. Yes, sir. [Speaker 2] The five months you're referring to, does that include the two reserve accounts? [Speaker 1] Yes, so that includes the traditional reserve that we built up plus the insurance reserves. [Speaker 2] Because I think the traditional reserve we talk about is what we have in our policy four to six months. [Speaker 1] Yes. [Speaker 2] The insurance reserve is not calculated. [Speaker 1] It's not managed by policy, but there's not, in my mind, maybe you feel differently and that's okay. In my mind, there's not a significant difference between those two funds, right? Those are funds that have been set aside from prior year activity with no obligation set against them that are available in the event that we have some type of catastrophe. [Speaker 7] Other colleges use, I'm sorry. Using the cash on hand, which we previously did many years ago, how many months would we have there if we were using what our peers are typically using? [Speaker 1] So, the standard under the cash on hand model is 180 days cash on hand, or roughly half of your total operating budget in cash reserves. Well, we have almost $40 million in reserves set aside plus all of our operating budget. Now, that number varies, right? Because as you know, we collect most of our money in February, it kind of maxes in March, and then it goes down until we start collecting ad valorem taxes again. So, we're between six months and a year, depending on what time of year that you're actually looking at that. And so, we could reasonably reduce our dedicated reserves by probably half and never drop below the six months cash on hand reserve. And I'm not advocating for that. I'm very happy with where we are with our reserves. This gives us tremendous flexibility. It makes me feel very comfortable based on the research that I've done and working with insurance underwriters that even in the event of a major storm, we confidently can cover the college. And that's very good for us. We could be spending that money on an insurance premium that the college has never used in the past and doesn't look like we'd ever use in the foreseeable future, and that money's just gone. We get no residual benefit for it. So, I'm very happy with where we are. I'm not advocating that we change. I'm just advocating that what we have in there is enough, and now we can use our cash for current year projects as opposed to building up the reserve. [Speaker 2] I'm comfortable with what you're proposing. I think in the past, we had conversations on two different funds for two different reasons. We didn't look at our reserve, the big reserve fund to cover a catastrophic event. It was more for operational needs funding from one of our major sources. So, but that started a long time ago, and I think at the time, we didn't have money in either one of those funds, right? And so, we began to grow both. And obviously, the cash reserve, with the four-month target, four to six-month was accelerated, but the insurance fund was separate and apart from that. So, we can have that conversation at another time, but I'm comfortable with how you phrased it and combined the two and the reality of how or why we would use it. I think Regent Hemsel always had asked for a spend-down scenario of our cash reserves, and what would that look like? In my opinion, we'd never spend it down because if it's that catastrophic, the rest of the community is catastrophic, and why are we, you know? But anyway, another conversation for another time, but I'm comfortable with what you're... [Speaker 1] And for the record, we still track those separately, but in doing the five-month calculation, the five months of reserves includes both the standard reserve and the insurance reserve. [Speaker 3] Thank you. One more question. The 40 million or whatever it is, does the earnings on that money go back into the reserve accounts? [Speaker 1] No. So, the earnings on those funds are included as part of our interest earnings, which get allocated and used as part of our annual budget. [Speaker 3] It'd be good if we put it back in so that it would stay up within inflation and continue to build a little bit if we're not gonna continue to contribute to it? [Speaker 1] So, that's a philosophical question that we could discuss. Because policy dictates that we have a four-month reserve, in years where our revenue goes up and our total budget grows, we have to put more money in there in order to maintain that minimum amount of balance. And so, effectively, that requires us to use some of those interest earnings to grow the funds to account for the growth in our total budget. When you have years like this where our total budget declines, now you have an increase in the total number of months that you have available, because the total budget is less, right? If you take our budget divided by 12, that number's smaller than it was last year. So, the same amount of money gives us more months of reserve. And so, I'm probably not an advocate for doing that. That would allow that to continue to grow based on a figure separate from the growth in our total budget. Whereas, if we're trying to maintain that four-month minimum, we have to put money into there to keep that four-month minimum when our total budget gets larger. And so, it forces us to put money aside as opposed to pre-electing to do that on an interest-based basis. Either way, the fund grows as the total budget grows. Why are we forecasting a $100,000 decrease in? So, part of that is based on how much we earned this year compared to what we budgeted. So, we are earning $100,000 less this year than what we budgeted. So, part of that is based on that. Part of that is based on the fact that rates have been fairly flat. And so, with rates being fairly flat and our total revenue being less than it was last year, that's why we reduced the budget. If we were in a growth sector like we were a few years ago where rates just continue to go up and up and up, we would be projecting an increase. Rates are fairly stable right now. So, it's just based on what we earned last year. [Speaker 4] Okay, that's what I was hoping you'd say. Because market trends are the rates are gonna go up in the next year. But if we're starting $100,000 behind the eight ball, I fully understand, okay. [Speaker 1] And we're okay if we earn more revenue than we budgeted. Where we get into trouble is if we have less revenue than what we budgeted. [Speaker 5] Jacob, in this schedule you refer to Appendix A3 and on A3 it talks about capital reserves. Comment on what we use that for. [Speaker 6] Yes, let me just pull that up really quick. [Speaker 5] Heard you, not my fault. It was a little tiny note. [Speaker 1] All right, so this is essentially the calculation of what I was trying to explain before, right? In terms of the growth of our total reserves and then how we do the calculation to determine how many months we have available. So you can see we have $34.6 million available right now at $6,930,000 a month. That's how we get to the five month calculation. [Speaker 6] Answer your question? [Speaker 9] Oh, capital asset, what are we? [Speaker 1] So, we have our insurance reserves, we have some money set aside for capital assets. And what that is, is we sold some property and we took that money and we set it in a separate fund. But we have no dedicated purpose for that money, right? And so that's the capital asset reserve and then we have the board operating reserve which we have actively managed since that time. [Speaker 5] That answers my question, thank you. [Speaker 1] Okay. [Speaker 6] Oh, let's see, where were we? Any other questions before I move on from general operating? Bonds and capital lease expense. [Speaker 1] So, our INS rate, our interest in sinking fund rate is set based on what we are required to collect based on our property valuations and our tax rate to meet our obligation. And so this rate fluctuates as our total principal and interest payment for the year fluctuates. Now, you remember a few years ago, we were making early defeasance payments. So, you took the INS minimum required rate that we had to collect, then the board authorized an additional rate in order to collect the additional million dollars, then we applied that to our debt and paid down our debt early. So, the minimum INS obligation is what is reflected here in terms of our total debt. And we haven't added new debt since last year. This is just the changes due to our schedule of payments. And from an accounting perspective, this would be a lot easier if it was like a home mortgage where your payment was fixed throughout the whole entire time, but it's not. Changes every single year and it goes up and it goes down based on when we refinanced and when we issued new debt. And so we just have to monitor this on a year to year basis. So, in summary, you can see that we're proposing $84,260,000 in total expenses. Our projected revenue is 83,900,000. So, there's about a 300, $360,000 difference. This was all the work that we could do and everything that we could cut without having to make really, really hard decisions about cutting things that was going to start to be painful, really painful for the institution. We're not going to finalize this until we get final property valuations back on ad valorem taxes. And if those property valuations come in lower, then we'll make those hard decisions and I'll bring that back to you in August when we get ready to present the budget. If property valuations come in as projected or a little bit higher, then this is going to essentially be what we're going to ask you to adopt in August. Next, I would like to give you a short overview on capital projects. As a little bit of background, right? Every year, we have had some surplus revenue. Partly because we've collected more revenue than what we budgeted we were going to collect and partly because our expenses were lower than expected. And we've taken that surplus and we've divvied that up. Now, for several years, most of that went into the reserve fund, but now that our reserve fund is properly funded for the last two years, we've been using those funds to cover capital projects. We expect a surplus again this year and we want to talk about how we would like to propose the use of those funds for capital projects coming up in FY27. So this is what we approved last year. You can see there that we allocated $9.5 million. We have not spent all of that money. It's sometimes difficult to spend all of those, that amount of money in capital projects in one year. So part of what we're going to propose this year is allowing the allocations that were made last year to roll forward to next year with a few adjustments based on re-prioritization of needed projects. Part of what we want to do is request the allocation of the existing surplus from this year to address some new issues that we haven't been talking about nearly as much as we've needed to in the past. So if things hold the way that we're looking right now, we could have as much as $4 million in surplus at the end of this year. I would like to take that $4 million and reallocate $1 million from physical facility projects that have not been started or incomplete from this year and put essentially $5 million into our IT infrastructure. We've done a really good job, really admirable job trying to address deferred maintenance from a physical facilities perspective for the last several years. And I think you've all noted the improvements that you've seen around campus. Some very visible, some not so visible, but we have good, reliable roofs on every single building. We've addressed a host of safety issues. We've made some very good improvements and there's still a lot of work to do there. But what we haven't done so good of a job at is updating our IT infrastructure. So you can see the large item here is 117 end-of-life switches. Now when I say end-of-life, I mean they're so old that we don't get service, there's no replacement, there's no repair. We have no other option, right? Either we start to see areas of our network go down or we replace these switches. So this has really risen to a critical need for the institution. And replacing these switches will help stabilize our network and improve the quality of our IT services all across campus. In addition to that, we want to continue to build out our classroom learning space with laser projections. We wanna continue to add high-flex space so that our professors can have hybrid learning take place, students in class, students online at the same time. We started a library student loaner program for laptops several years ago. And that's been very successful and it is widely used by our students. And those machines are all end-of-life. And we probably should have been replacing part of them every single year, we haven't. And so now we need 500,000 plus to replace all of those loaner laptops. And that has been so successful for our students that has also become a high priority critical need for us. And then we have a couple of other small items that we would like to include in this. The point being, we want to continue spending the money that was allocated last year for facilities and other projects with a $1 million reallocation into IT along with any of the surplus that we have from this existing year. This will take a huge bite out of our deferred maintenance in our IT infrastructure. And it'll make it much more plausible for us to get IT infrastructure on a more manageable annual repair and replacement schedule, similar to what we've been able to do with our facilities team. But we need this huge influx of capital in order to address our most glaring and critical needs that we have right now. I'm gonna go through the appendix really quickly just so that you know what's in there and then you guys can dig in and study that at your own. [Speaker 3] 110 classrooms that you're wanting to put lasers in. Are those identified as classrooms that are being used? Level that we require or need to be done? [Speaker 1] So if you're referring to our utilization study and whether or not these are classrooms that are actively being used or not, yes, these are the classrooms that are actively being utilized. Some of the classrooms that are listed as not being online or not being scheduled, they're not included in this. [Speaker 6] All right, eliminated positions. [Speaker 1] So you can see that several of these are faculty-related positions. Some of these positions have been vacant for a long, long time. Other positions are those that we can reasonably replace with adjuncts at a significantly reduced cost for the institution. Our ratio will still be, our ratio of full-time faculty taught classes to adjunct faculty classes won't change significantly with these changes, but these are some of the changes that we have proposed in terms of reduction of positions. This list isn't finalized. It won't be finalized until we get the final budget, but this is very near to what we think we'll need to eliminate in terms of positions. Did this result in any layoffs or? It did not. Every one of these positions was vacant or is presently vacant. We did implement a hiring freeze or a hiring chill when we got the news regarding changes in state appropriations. We have started to approve new positions and once we get the finalized budget in August and we have a balanced budget, we'll be able to eliminate that freeze and go back to refilling vacant positions as they come open. But we're still going to pause or be very strategic until the budget is actually finalized in August. These are the new positions that we've added. The enrollment management position was added mid-year in January and so we had to build that into our budget for this upcoming year since that position already exists. The other five positions are all related to building out and offering the AA program at Huntsville. And so those will largely be covered out of the tuition, the additional tuition revenue that we earn at Huntsville and we either needed to fill these positions or cancel the AA program. We already talked about the calculation on the five-month reserve and then this is just a more detailed summary of the other operating changes that we made. I would like to recognize the members of cabinet and the tremendous work that they did during this process. We spend months and months getting the budget ready every single year and in June, we got this notice and in less than a month, we have gone through, made some really difficult decisions and have done it very collaboratively. And I really need to take my hat off to the members of cabinet for the dutiful way that they approached this, for the lack of selfishness that they demonstrated in trying to make these cuts and to really pull as a team to get this number down to where it is right now. One other thing that I should mention as part of these cuts, we are restricting travel and we're eliminating remote professional development for this year. So individuals still be able to engage in professional development activities, but they'll have to do those online and in order to save some money and we did that across campus. So that's applied to essentially every single department. We did reduce the board's travel budget as part of this and we significantly reduced the president's travel budget. Essentially, we're trying to limit travel to either grant funded or required travel only for this next year. Now, many of our employees are concerned, right? They understand the need to make these cuts right now, they're worried about what are we gonna do next year and how do we bring some of these services back? What I would like to say about that is, these were all very nice things for us to have and they help us be more efficient as an institution and they help us, they provide some advantages for us, right? Cutting these things long-term is not a recipe for success as an institution. So as funding situations change in the future, you will go through a similar process to try and prioritize as we bring these items back online to restore some of these. And obviously, travel and some of those needed positions, funding for our student labor, those are gonna be at the top of the list. But we will go through a very similar process. So each of these items will be justified and they'll be compared and considered along with all of the other needs of the institution as we bring new budgets back in the future. But we recognize the sacrifices that this will require and some of the changes that our employees will have to make because of this. So I'm personally grateful as the president for the effort and the understanding that has been demonstrated, not only by cabinet, but by individuals all across campus. With that, I would ask if there are any other questions. [Speaker 2] I just wanna also commend you and your team for the effort you made. I know it was all last minute. The state appropriation change was a surprise to everyone. And I didn't hear you one time mention reduction of services to our students. And that was really important that we do everything we can to stay within our budget and everything we can to not reduce services to our students which is why we're here. So thank you for that. [Speaker 1] Thank you. Definitely our number one priority. [Speaker 2] Other questions or comments? Jacob, back to Huntsville. [Speaker 3] Frank and Eve are making money on that entire program. [Speaker 1] That entire program of Huntsville? Oh, we're making money on Huntsville. We make a lot of money on Huntsville. Huntsville is our cash cow. [Speaker 3] Okay, that's the first time I've heard that used before. [Speaker 1] So. [Speaker 3] I wasn't sure. [Speaker 1] So. [Speaker 3] Is it a separate cost center we have set up for that? [Speaker 1] Yeah, so we track all of the expenses separately for Huntsville. It's included in the total budget. So we with Pell for inmates and because of the way that state appropriations are allocated, we get compensated well for the education that we provide for our inmates. There are additional expenses, of course, trying to provide education in the prison system. We have nine, soon I think we're gonna have 10 different units that we teach at. That's a lot of travel. It's spread out. The students can't do very much work on their own, which means advisors are having to do significantly more with every single student than they would here on campus. So there are additional expenses. But again, remember that almost every single one of our inmates qualifies for all three weights and they complete at a rate of 85 to 90%, which is four times as high as basically anybody else in the community college world in Texas. And so they're very successful and we're compensated very well for their success and we're very lucky to have that program. And it's part of the reason, finances aside, the work that we do up there is important and it's a calling and it makes as big a difference in their lives as education makes in anybody's life, probably more so. But from a financial perspective, the way that it's currently structured, and it hasn't always been this way, but the way it's currently structured, we are highly incentivized to invest in Huntsville. And my vision is to see that continue to grow. And for Lee College, that does it bigger and better than anybody else in the state, to continue to grow that footprint and expand into more and more units all across the state. [Speaker 8] I have a question about elimination assistant coach. Is it because we had two and we're going down to one? And is it on the basketball side or the volleyball side? [Speaker 1] So we have to have an assistant coach in each program. And so we had a third assistant and I'm not sure that we're actually gonna cut that position. It kind of depends on how things play out with ad valorem, but we will still have a full-time assistant in both sports. [Speaker 6] Questions or comments? Very much. [Speaker 2] That information. And again, thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. Thank you very much. Next item on the agenda is matters of concern for future agendas. All right, hearing none. Well, we are adjourned. [Speaker 10] We have a schedule too.