Premium ContentClick on Premium Content on the Featured navigation bar for information.
Metropolitan Community College will sue Nebraska’s five other community colleges, trying to wrest away millions of state aid dollars that Metro leaders say rightfully belong to their school.
The planned lawsuit, authorized Tuesday night by Metro’s board, will be filed in Lancaster County Court “in the very near future,” Metro laywer Bob Canella said.
The legal action also will further “drive a wedge” between Metro and the other community colleges, Southeast Community College President Jack Huck said today, worsening an already long and ugly fight over the state’s distribution of this year’s community college funding.
“It saddens me deeply that they would choose to do this,” said Huck, who learned of the planned lawsuit from reading The World-Herald. “We all have to make choices about how we conduct ourselves, and obviously (Metro) is making choices that aren’t in conjunction with our beliefs.”
Metro’s president, board chairman and lawyer say a lawsuit is the only way to recover about $9 million in state aid they say should have come Metro’s way.
It didn’t, they say, because the other community colleges intentionally misreported their tuition numbers, lowering them so the colleges could get a bigger share of state aid. The state then wrongly distributed the money, Metro leaders say.
Southeast, for example, reported its tuition and fee figure at $1.7 million in August, even though it estimated that figure at $19.8 million in June.
“This was a concerted effort by five other colleges to work together as a team. They understood they were going to hurt Metro, and they didn’t care,” Metro President Randy Schmailzl said.
Huck confirmed that Southeast and the other schools submitted artificially low tuition numbers — but only because Metro, in its own attempt to get a bigger piece of the $88 million state aid pie, had used outlandish accounting first.
Before reporting its tuition figure to the state, Metro moved approximately $13.5 million in tuition money to a capital fund for the construction and renovation of campus buildings.
It then subtracted that $13.5 million from its total tuition figure for state aid calculation.
In August, the other community colleges simply adjusted their state aid figures so the aid would be divided the same way it would have been had all schools reported their total tuition figures, Huck and Michael Chipps, president of Mid-Plains Community College, have said.
The Nebraska Coordinating Commission of Postsecondary Education took these figures — Huck dubbed them the “Metro methodology” — and passed them along to the Nebraska Revenue Department.
Dennis Baack, director of the Nebraska Community College Association, has argued that Metro ignored the clear intent of the state funding formula — indeed, the very definition of “tuition and fees” — when it moved that $13.5 million. He and the state’s other community college presidents blame Metro for starting the funding fight.
“It says to report tuition and fees, not just tuition, in the general fund. That’s the total tuition and fees,” Baack said in September.
He said today that the other colleges were consulting their attorneys. He declined to comment further.
Metro leaders hotly deny that allegation, saying Metro’s movement of money was allowed by existing audit guidelines agreed to by the colleges in 2007. Metro officials also say Metro moved the money in a deliberate and transparent way, for an obvious purpose — new construction — just as the college has every year since 2003.
Metro leaders aren’t sure the other schools actually moved any money out of their general funds. If they did, it is unclear whether they used that money for construction.
“I’ll tell you one thing — we’re sure gonna find out,” said Canella.
The resolution authorizing the lawsuit passed 10-1, with board member Fred Conley dissenting. The lawsuit is a bad idea, Conley said, because Metro should work with the Legislature and other community colleges to come to a future solution, not fight over state aid already being distributed.
“There’s an attempt going to get all the community colleges back together. This is just going to inhibit that,” Conley said.
Contact the writer:
444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
