The campus's longstanding commitment to consultation remains strong, said Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw, responding to a March 29 Sacramento Bee article about a memo she and Campus Counsel Steve Drown sent to deans and vice chancellors explaining the law's provisions for confidentiality in preliminary budget deliberations.

"I certainly plan to use the principles and practices of openness that the campus has pursued in the past," she said. "If anything, we will do more to broadly communicate campus resource allocation proposals and decisions and the principles upon which they are based."

Hinshaw said the memo in question "recognizes explicitly what we all know - that candor can be impaired and needed discussion restricted when ideas, options and working papers are prematurely exposed to a broad audience. It recognizes that there is a balance to be struck between the public's interest in disclosure and the public's interest in a decisional process in which predecisional discussions can be frank and full."

Hinshaw said she circulated the memo in February after several requests for guidance about how to strike this balance in deliberations at the dean, vice chancellor and department chair level before proposals are put on the table for public discussion.

"The memorandum simply acknowledges a tension that has always existed in the deliberative processes of this or any other public institution," she said. "It existed during the Phase III budget reduction process (of the early 1990s) and was successfully negotiated then. It emphatically will not change the campus's longstanding commitment to consultation."

The campus's budget reduction planning was suspended in mid-January, following the governor's announcement of a more optimistic 2002-03 budget recommendation for UC than anticipated. Vice chancellors and deans earlier had been instructed to prepare 8 percent budget reduction recommendations, though cuts ultimately were to be strategic rather than across the board.

But with state revenues still in decline, the campus will need to resume its budget reduction planning soon, Hinshaw said, and will follow the principles and consultation process outlined in her Dec. 18 instructional letter to deans, vice chancellors and vice provosts.

"The timeline will be different, obviously, but the steps will be the same," Hinshaw said.

The December letter, posted on the campus's budget Web site at www.news.ucdavis.edu/budget/, advised deans, vice chancellors and vice provosts that their budget plans initially would be reviewed by the provost with the advice of the Office of Resource Management and Planning and of a small working group of administrators, staff and faculty. Hinshaw would then provide her initial reaction to each dean, vice chancellor and vice provost before drafting a campuswide budget-reduction strategy for discussion with campus constituency groups and with the UC Davis community at large.

After considering comments that arise from this broader consultation, she would then announce a final budget plan.

"Many who were on campus for the Phase III budget reduction process will note the similarities between that highly consultative process and the one I outlined in the Dec. 18 letter," Hinshaw said.

"As we again enter into budget discussions, it's important to remember that we have survived past financial challenges and we will do so again. We have every right to think positively about our future."