3/13/2012: Always a thrilling topic. This Emily Schiola story in the ODE argues UO has overcharged the student government by $100,000 on overhead rates.
Here’s a little history. The assessment on the student government ASUO expenditures (Incidental Fees) has been increasing from 2% to 7%. Athletics pays 3%, nominally. Their effective rate is more like 2%, because many of their expenditures are exempt.
Steve Duin’s column in the Oregonian in November covered the basics:
As Laura Hubbard, associate VP for Budget & Finance, noted at the time, those changes were necessary to meet Oregon University System “guiding principles” in allowing indirect costs that are “reasonable, properly allocable, auditable and applied consistently across campus.”
None of that applied to the jocks, of course. Athletic’s low rate was the result of a secret deal between Frohnmayer and Kilkenny, signed two weeks before Frohnmayer retired. That contract is here and is full of unusual things, amounting to several million dollars in subsidies for athletics. I wonder what Frohnmayer got in return for signing it?
It was so secret even UO’s VP for Finance Frances Dyke never saw it – or so she claims. Guess who has to pay the rest of these costs for them. And what do they do with this ~$3 million subsidy? First thing, everybody gets a car! Then more fat raises.
New CFO Jamie Moffitt is now redoing the overhead rate setting process to try and follow the OUS rules that rates be “reasonable, properly allocable, auditable and applied consistently across campus.”
So, I wonder if she will include the athletic department’s unusually high legal costs, set-asides for future MTBI liabilities, their portion of public records costs, the $200,000 or so for NCAA representative Jim O’Fallon’s salary and office costs, the $2 million jock box subsidy, and a fair proportion in the $2 million UOPD budget increases in her calculations?
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