I caught this in a short story in this morning’s Star-Bulletin on the University of Hawaii budget:
[UH President David] McClain said UH economists believe the governor might have to double the 10 to 20 percent cuts currently being asked for to balance the state budget.
Possible 40% budget cuts? Those won’t be cuts. Those would entail wholesale dismantling of programs and services.
And will cuts of anything like that order of magnitude put all that spending on a West Oahu campus back on the table for reconsideration?
No wonder Gov. Lingle wants to be traveling instead of staying home and facing the crisis.
Here’s an unconfirmed rumor passed along by a friend:
…heard from a decent source that 20 people have come forward to accept buyouts at the tiser but the company needs 120 positions to be eliminated…hope this is not true because a lot of good people will be put out of work – and god knows what that means for the SB.
And these comments about the Star-Bulletin’s situation were tucked away at the bottom of a Pacific Business News story on Monday about the latest Advertiser cuts.
At the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, publisher Dennis Francis said Monday he couldn’t disclose anything about the privately-owned newspaper’s finances, but said, “As you can probably guess, we are not totally immune to at least some of the downturn in the economy.”
He said the newspaper’s classified advertising is in a slump along with the rest of the industry, but that its retail advertising and specialty publications are showing “a slight gain” in revenue over the same period last year.
“Nonetheless, we are in the process of reevaluating everything we are currently doing with the expectation it is going to get worse and perhaps for a more prolonged period of time than we are used to seeing,” Francis said.
The Star-Bulletin and MidWeek are owned by Black Press of Victoria, B.C.
Short attention span. Last week, there was lots of coverage of a deal between Republic Airways and local Mokulele Airlines to expand new interisland service.
But when Mokulele flights were temporarily grounded this week on the advice of the FAA, little mention was made. A Google search just turned up coverage by AP, PBN and KGMB.
Have a listen to the voices that make the ominous election ads, from an NPR interview (there’s also a link to their commentary from 2006, which was hilarious and scary at the same time).
On the cat front…Blood test discovered that Mr. Romeo tested positive for the heartworm antibody, but not the antigen. Apparently this means that he’s been exposed in the past. We’ve got him on Revolution, which is supposed to zap heartworms as well as fleas. Silverman, on the other hand, came out clean.
WOuld you call this laying down on the job? Actually, I was teasing Ms. Wally with a dangling feather cat toy. Normally I would have been very cautious, but when she went to the vet for her dental work, they trimmed her usually very sharp front claws. It makes quite a difference. In any case, it’s another Feline Friday, and if you click on Ms. Wally’s photo, you’ll get to the whole batch of this Friday’s images.
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I’m on my kids’ SCC board and we were discussing at our last meeting the pending budget cuts. And the question becomes: when is too little too much? When do you have to throw up your hands and say “we cannot provide an education for our children with these funds”. When do you decide to close a school? Because, at the school level, it’s getting that close. NCLB is going to be thrown out the window for many reasons, but one of which is that the schools aren’t going to have a fighting of chance of even having enough teachers, let alone meeting ridiculous standards. 40% cuts at the University level mean the same thing — departments will have to close.