Raises Raise Eyebrows

August 4, 2016

By State Senator Joe Markley

It seems the profligacy of UConn administrators knows no bounds. At this time of economic crisis, everyone is being asked to sacrifice: state employees, students, taxpayers, everyone it seems except the well-heeled and well-connected insiders at UConn. While hospitals are getting cut, tuition at state colleges is increasing, and property taxes are going up as the result of crumbling state finances, UConn President Susan Herbst has decided to give some of her favorite underlings handsome taxpayer funded raises.

According to the Hartford Courant, Herbst wrote this to a UConn bureaucrat who already draws a taxpayer financed salary north of six-figures:

“Your current salary of $225,000 is below the median salary for your colleagues who serve in similar roles at comparable institutions,” Herbst wrote Laura Cruickshank, the university’s chief architect. By “Jan. 1, 2017, your annual salary will be $283,000 per year, which is the figure in the 75th percentile of pay for your position nationally last year.”

This is nothing new. Fiscal mismanagement has become a malignant under the Herbst Administration. I should remind readers that it was Herbst who paid a consultant $4 million to find efficiencies and new revenue opportunities to offset lower state funding. Why couldn’t she have offered more employee efficiency incentives, like private sector companies do?

After the news of the most recent raises got out even the left-leaning New Haven Register scolded the out-of-touch Herbst administration with, “At this point, University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst might as well heat the student union in Storrs next winter with a furnace that only burns $100 bills.”

When this story broke, my colleague Republican Senate Leader Len Fasano asked a very fair question, “Where were the trustees?”

Well apparently they support the President’s decision. The CT Mirror is now reporting that these same trustees have approved a budget which builds in a very large spending increase at the University starting in 2017.

This tells me that the trustees and the President are betting on their liberal Democrat buddies in the legislature sleazing past November’s election, just to turn around next spring and raise our taxes again.

The Democrat politician—UConn axis is well documented. The UConn Foundation paid out $250,000 for an hour long chit chat between President Herbst and Hillary Clinton in 2013. Although it is true that most (although not all) of the UConn Foundation’s expenses come from private donations, those donations should help support the academic mission of the school, not line the pockets of global political elites.

It’s a lead pipe cinch that as soon as the Democrat majorities are safely re-elected, Herbst will ask her chums in the legislature to raise your taxes so she can fulfill the spending plans for 2017 which have already been approved by the UConn Trustees.

Herbst once said that she valued being in a progressive state that invests in education. Maybe, this is the wrong attitude for any state agency head to possess these days.