4/8/2011: A commenter suggests that these Huron invoices are not complete. We are on that. Since we have an active petition in with the Attorney General, we are expecting that we will get a quick answer from UO this time:
Date: April 7, 2011 5:23:24 PM PDT
To: Elizabeth Denecke
Cc: Public Records Requests, Kron Michael C , Andrea McFarlane , Moira Kiltie , …
Subject: Re: PRR request, Huron ConsultingHi Liz
I’m thinking that UO doesn’t pay out $1.5 million, $143K at a pop, without a slightly more detailed invoice. At least they never have for me.
So was there any more to the invoices? Supporting material? Description of the work product? Itemization of hours and expenses? I’d appreciate a quick response, and I will drop the petition if I get the complete invoices, or assurance from you that the invoices Huron sent UO do not include anything additional, beyond what you provided below.
Meanwhile, thanks for your consideration of my fee waiver request. The documents you provided are now posted at https://uomatters.com/2011/04/just-dont-make-johnson-hall-look-bad.html as promised. …
Thanks, (UO Matters)@uoregon.edu>@uoregon.edu>@doj.state.or.us>@uoregon.edu>@uoregon.edu>
Another commenter points out that the contract has issues and may have been a violation state purchasing rules. I’m not going to pursue that angle – I don’t really care whether the administration is pissing my money away legally or illegally.
I applaud UO Matters for pursuing this story. The money involved is not chump change.
The stonewalling by members of the administration is counterproductive. It merely raises suspicions. Is the problem that there is no work product to share with the university community?
Huron is running UO’s ORSA for us and these consultants are busy. The question is not work product, it’s why we are spending 5x what it would cost for UO to do this work internally, and why this has all been done in secret with out even having open bids or just hiring our own qualified grant administrators – either of which which would have saved a lot of money.
The answer is that to have hiring, or worse open bids on the contract, would have meant that the mistakes by Linton, Dyke, and Bean which lead to the ORSA collapse would become public knowledge.
And UO’s administrators are always happy to spend $1 million of other people’s money to avoid embarrassment for themselves.
Dog supports anonymous and adds that
this kind of thing is shameful and totally dysfunctional for any research University to engage in.
Its completely unnecessary, wasteful,
eventually costs us ICC money (how do you think this is being funded) and generally stinks.
Hell of thing to deal with for a new starting VPR.
Having squandered millions in excessive administrative budget increases, remodeling their offices, golden parachutes, and other brilliant ideas, Johnson Hall’s solution for science startups is to spend against reserves in the humanities and social sciences. Despite having the least funding per student on campus, these programs and the college in which they reside have exercised the financial discipline and responsibility so lacking centrally, and so they have slowly accumulated substantial reserves over the last decade. These are funds they or their college on their behalf, could spend to support the humanities and social sciences. Instead, Johnson Hall is expropriating the reserves by forcing CAS to use them for science startups without any provision for even partial repayment from the Research office. Repayment could be done slowly by promising a small share of future overhead, but ‘no, we’re in charge,’ said our czars. The longstanding ‘covenant’ with the research office has been that they receive and allocate all grant overhead. In return they assume primary responsibility for startup packages for hires anticipated to receive substantial grants. Having broken that covenant, they now demand that the humanities and social sciences, the least well-funded programs per student on campus to fix their failures.