ACC Trustees unanimously approved the college’s 2024-25 budget during its July 1 regular meeting after five months of discussion. Approval came after an in-depth discussion about employee compensation.
The $534 million budget—the college’s first over $500 million—represents a more than 8% increase over the 2023-24 budget. The balanced budget includes funds for:
- existing operations,
- new initiatives like the Free Tuition Pilot Program for the high school class of 2024 and the Affordability Scholarship,
- an additional $500,000 allocated to the Student Emergency Fund,
- increasing the number of full-time faculty positions by 100,
- proposed election services for three Board of Trustees seats and the potential Lockhart annexation.
It also includes a 4.5% salary increase across the board for all employees and increases the college’s minimum wage from $22 to $23 an hour (or $47,840 annually). The increase represents a growth of more than 53% in the college’s minimum wage rate over the last three years.
Understanding the Revenue Stream
ACC’s budget comprises three primary revenue streams: property taxes, tuition and fees, and state appropriations.
Property taxes generate approximately 67.3% of the district’s total revenue. Tuition and fees make up 15.7%, and state funding accounts for about 14.1% of the college’s revenue. The remaining 2.8% of the budget comes from other small sources of revenue.
The new budget cycle begins September 1.
Employee Compensation Examined
In June, the Full-Time Faculty Senate asked the board for an 8.5% raise. At the July meeting, the association explained that the requested increase was designed to bring salaries in line with the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The association applied that methodology retroactively to 2016.
“Our salaries have not kept pace with inflation, making it increasingly difficult to afford living expenses. The Senate is proposing a catch-up salary adjustment of 8.5% to address this erosion over the past 7 years,” said Faculty Senate President Juan Molina. “Salaries should not only help employees survive, but thrive. If they thrive, our students succeed.”
All but one of the employee associations and several individual employees who addressed the board during the citizen’s communications portion of the meeting reiterated the request.
In light of the associations’ request, trustees and administration held a thorough discussion about how employee compensation is determined at the college. ACC Executive Vice Chancellor of Finance & Administration Neil Vickers started by explaining the basis for the 4.5% increase and how it is grounded in board policy, which says the college has to be market competitive. He said that board policy compares ACC’s non-faculty salaries against the top Texas metropolitan community colleges and the local market. Faculty salaries must be within the top three of our peer metro community colleges based on board policy, and adjunct faculty salaries are a percentage of that.
Even though board policy doesn’t currently consider inflation, Vickers said that “the college has done a good job of meeting or beating the rate of inflation over time. We can and are doing more than anyone else.”
Vickers said that the majority of our peers are implementing 3-4% raises, and most independent school districts (ISDs) are doing around 3% raises. Additionally, he said that he has yet to find a public employer that has a minimum wage as high as ACC’s.
“Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to really sit down and talk through this with our faculty, but I view it as a proposal to make changes to our compensation policy on how we could administer raises,” said Vickers.
If the board wants to use another methodology going forward, Vickers said they will need to have a policy conversation about how the college determines annual raises.
The Classified Employee Association (CEA) supported the college’s 4.5% raise.
“I had some explaining to do to my constituents as to why our association asked for only a 4.5% raise across the board,” said CEA President Bernie Hinterlong. “In my opinion, I believe it is what is best for the college and will make our job easier when we start the reclassification and compensation study with Guidehouse.”
Guidehouse, the consultant hired to do an in-depth compensation analysis of job classification and compensation systems, will start its review and evaluation later this month. According to college administration, we may be able to leverage them to do a deeper dive into our compensation structure, and the information they provide would be helpful in determining if the board wants to make policy changes.
“We know that we need to be a little bit more flexible to continue to attract and retain the talent that we need for our students, and I personally am worried that our current policy isn’t defining the market as broad as it needs to be,” said Trustee Stephanie Gharakhanian. “I want to make sure that we are complying with the policy, but I certainly don’t view it as a ceiling, I consider it a floor.”
Gharakhanian proposed amending the budget to include a 5.5% raise for employees, which didn’t have enough votes to pass. Another proposal of 5% was presented by Trustee Nan McRaven, but it only secured three votes.
“I hear what everybody’s been saying and really do want to take care of our faculty and staff but I don’t feel like this budget supports it,” said Trustee Dana Walker. “But I do think we should push really hard in the next year to get a better grip on all of our budget and figure out how we do come up with funding to support more for our faculty and staff.”
Throughout the budget discussion, trustees expressed interest in getting a better understanding of the budget as a whole during the year to help inform future budget decisions. Trustees also discussed other options to show appreciation for faculty that are not financial, such as home campuses and faculty housing.
“We can’t fix a national crisis at this level, but I think that we should start looking at what we can do for compensation that isn’t necessarily financial because there are things that we could do,” said Trustee Julie Ann Nitsch. “We have to provide for the people that we employ. And right now, I don’t think we are.”
The final vote to adopt the budget as presented was approved unanimously.
“I really appreciate the work that the Faculty Senate did. This is my first experience with the budget here. My hope is that when we have proposals like this, that we have them months in advance and can work on them together,” said ACC Chancellor Dr. Russell Lowery-Hart.
“The hardest part of this conversation is that we’re fundamentally talking about an inequitable, unjust economic model for the country,” he said. “ACC will never be able to fix the broken economic model. But if you look at what we’ve done over the past 10 years, I think we are trying harder than most any other school I’ve seen to adjust to it. But even with the resources we have, we will never be able to solve it, so we’ve got to be creative in how we do it.”
As a hard working faculty at ACC, I am deeply disappointed that you did not implement pay increase beyond 4.5%. Nothing changed after the debate. Very disappointing.
It is disappointing and disheartening that we consistently receive minimal support. We believe we deserve a higher raise.