Maxwell ReedSantiago Canyon College is seeking a $4 million credit line from the district’s reserves to rectify a budget deficit for paying part-time professors.
Acting SCC officials said the school did not account for paying salaries or benefits for any adjunct faculty in the 2026-2027 tentative budget. The discrepancy was not fixed by the time SCC calculated its adopted budget after the fiscal year began July 1, leaving the college with $75.6 million while its adopted budget required $79.4 million, a $3.77 million budget deficit.
“We were given different numbers every time [the Planning and Institutional Effectiveness Committee] met,” said Sheryl Martin, the Vice President of the California School Employees Association at SCC, in regards to academic salaries. Martin spoke about the gap at the Sept. 14 board meeting in response to questions from the trustees.
“They knew that they were going to overspend that fund every year. And when we asked, ‘How did this continue to happen?’ we were told, ‘I don’t know.’ The reality is, it’s been under-budgeted every year.”
At the meeting, the interim SCC president presented a prepared report on the budget and asked the board for the $4 million credit line.
Academic salaries accounted for the biggest discrepancy in the budget at around $5.5 million, with the tentative budget predicting $32.3 million and the actual budget allotting $37.8 million. Employee benefits also increased by about $1.2 million between the tentative and adopted budget, which includes healthcare for part-time faculty.
“I remember when we made a decision to begin [SCC], we knew that we’d be running deficits. And we knew that we’d have to be funding the deficits,” said Trustee Phillip Yarbrough.
During the presentation, Interim SCC President and Vice Chancellor of Academic Services Enrique Perez said he believes the college is not in a bad situation, but rather a college that overspends. He considers the budget deficit to be a spending issue rather than a revenue issue.
“If we don’t manage our budget, if we don’t manage how much we spend, it won’t matter what we generate,” said Perez.
Perez invited SCC faculty and classified leadership to present the College Council’s recommendations. The recommendations acknowledged that cuts are needed to balance the college’s budget, and requested that the board commission a review of the different issues that compounded to create the deficit in order to stop this from happening again.
“For me, it is very not acceptable,” Trustee Cecilia Iglesias said. “But I’m also seeing the trend. The trend is how the salaries are going up. The benefits are going up.”
The college may not end up needing to use the full $4 million, but Perez said he believes that the credit line is necessary in order to keep the college on the right track to implementing changes in the next two years to fix its budgetary deficit.
Acting Chancellor Iris Ingram, who is also the district’s vice chancellor of fiscal services, is currently acting as the Vice President of Administrative Services at SCC. She said that if the $4 million credit line from the district is approved, she would be the one to communicate with district staff on how much money SCC needs from the credit line.
“If it’s not needed, they won’t use it,” Ingram said.
If approved, the $4 million credit line would come from the district’s reserves, as outlined in the district’s adopted budget, which the Board of Trustees approved by unanimous vote at the same meeting.
If the Board of Trustees wants to approve the $4 million credit line to SCC, they will have to put it on the agenda and vote at a future meeting.
