Board president unleashes fury over budget shortfalls
UNM regents delay decision on whether to forgive department’s $7.52M debt
ALBUQUERQUE — Everybody has a breaking point, and Robert Doughty found his just before the lunch hour Thursday.
The president of The University of New Mexico’s Board of Regents interrupted a financial presentation by UNM athletic director Eddie Nuñez during Thursday’s budget summit to call one of the department’s executives to the podium.
What followed was a tense dressdown that called into question the athletic department’s bookkeeping practices and the regents’ ability to trust what they were hearing.
Nuñez and UNM’s chief financial officer of athletics, Rob Robinson, were at the summit to ask the regents to forgive the majority of what is now a $7.52 million deficit that grew by $3 million after Robinson studied the current athletics budget. The regents already transferred $1.25 million from a general university fund to cover some of the debt and pare it down to $6.2 million, but Nuñez was seeking an additional $5 million to cover most of the rest.
The board tabled action on the athletics budget until it receives a more detailed action plan from Nuñez and Robinson explaining how to stop the financial bleeding and more accurately account for where the money goes and, most important, how it is spent.
There were some glaring shortfalls with the current fiscal year, such as $1.5 million in unmet projections in men’s basketball ($546,267 short in estimated ticket sales), football ($360,167 shortage in ticket sales) and fundraising ($600,000). Another deficit of $116,598 is seen in student fees based on decreased enrollment.
“I don’t appreciate what we walked into, but I understand it more now a lot more than I did five, six months ago,” Nuñez said after the meeting. “And I understand that it’s just not the way that we’re going to go forward.”
Twenty minutes into the presentation by Nuñez and Robinson, Doughty cut them off and asked the deputy athletic director for external operations, Brad Hutchins, to come to the podium. It was Hutchins who addressed the board at last year’s summit.
“Last year we went through this song and dance and we went through line item by line item,” Doughty told Hutchins. “You looked me in the eye on behalf of this athletic administration and you made varied promises to me on the forecasted budget. And I believed you and the athletic program at the time, and after we were done I came out very optimistic.”
Doughty cupped his hands together and propped his elbows on the table. Twice he had his microphone cut out
when he slapped his hand on the table for emphasis.
“Well, I’m very upset today,” Doughty continued. “I feel like this board of regents, the folks that were here — and especially me — were misled and were told things that weren’t true. Were made false promises. I have to say that my time at this university the last four years as I sit here today, I think I’m as mad as I’ve ever been, and upset and disappointed. And I want to know right now, in front of everybody, why are we $3.3 million in the hole when I was promised last year that we had a balanced budget. And now we’re coming out and we’ve got this problem, and I want to know why.”
Robinson found other issues, such as revenue sharing from the Mountain West Conference and media rights agreements the school shares with an outside entity. He said the school is due a $250,000 payment as part of its pre-arranged agreements with media but didn’t include the amount in the revenue stream because it hadn’t been paid.
“The fundamental issue is the expenses are underbudgeted,” Robinson said.
“I can tell you everyday, even as of [Wednesday], we’re trying to understand how things were put in certain accounts,” Nuñez said. “It’s not that they were wrong. It’s just that’s not the way that it’s easy for us to understand and easy for others to see and understand it.”
Nuñez said UNM’s football team has secured future road games at LSU (in 2022) and Texas A&M (2023). Those agreements called for each school to pay UNM $250,000 right now and Nuñez took $100,000 from each contract to help finish a renovation to the football locker room at Dreamstyle Stadium. Nuñez eventually got around to addressing the elephant in the room: The possibility of cutting at least one of UNM’s 22 sports.
“I’m the first one to say that I do not want to cut a sport, but we have to look at this,” Nuñez said. “We have to look at it with everything on the table.”
Moving forward, at least some of the issues to be addressed are revenue sharing in the MWC and travel for all of UNM’s programs. Nuñez said none of the teams had postseason travel expenses budgeted into their accounts for the past few years. When a team does make it to a tournament, that expense comes from somewhere inside the team’s own fundraising arm or within the department itself.
“That number’s going to continue to get bigger if we don’t realize and start budget accordingly,” Nuñez said. “Right now, we’re not accurately budgeting for our teams to travel.”
The MWC’s share to UNM dropped by $1.5 million this year, causing a ripple effect in the rest of the budget.
“Unfortunately when the budget was made last year, the budget was made based on the numbers of last year, not taking into account what our distribution is this year with the decrease,” Robinson said.