By leaving several open positions unfilled and closing down its pioneering cat kidney-transplant program, the School of Veterinary Medicine has managed to absorb $1.54 million this year in state funding cuts. That decrease amounts to 8 percent of the school's operating budget, excluding faculty salaries.

"One thing we didn't want to do was impact our staff," said Bennie Osburn, dean of the veterinary school.

The budget cuts include a $400,000 decrease in Agricultural Experiment Station Funding, from $2 million to $1.6 million. Cooperative Extension funding also dropped by $234,000, from $937,000 to $703,000.

To cope with those decreases, four open positions funded with experiment-station money will go unfilled, and plans to add three open positions for Veterinary Medicine Extension have been put on hold.

The loss of experiment-station funding also limits the school's ability to leverage additional funds from federal agencies and commodity groups, Osburn said.

Some commodity groups, particularly the dairy industry, have stepped forward, however, with private money to keep veterinary extension programs viable, he added.

Another impact of the state budget cuts is that start-up salaries for new faculty are $20,000 to $30,000 lower than similar positions being offered by other veterinary schools throughout the nation, which the school anticipates will impact its future recruitment success, according to Osburn.

Although the school hasn't instituted a hiring freeze, staff positions are deliberately being filled at a much slower pace, he said.

The tighter economic climate also has resulted in termination of the cat kidney-transplant program at the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. "We just weren't able to provide the infrastructure for that program any longer," said Osburn, explaining that the costs of the surgery, case management, consumable supplies and drugs, as well as the difficulty of finding compatible donor animals to provide the needed kidneys were too great to maintain.

He noted that the school's reliance on state funding has gradually declined over the years. "Fifteen years ago, 50 percent of our funding was from the state," he said. "Now only 23 percent of our funding comes from the state. We've had to turn more to federal grants and contracts, as well as to private giving."

The state now provides about $33 million of the school's total $125 million budget.

Osburn says the school started planning about seven or eight years ago for a future economic slump, beefing up its efforts at private fund raising. "As a result, we've done better than any other veterinary school in fund-raising activities," he said. "We have a culture now in which our faculty and even students step right up to help with fund raising, making themselves available to meet with potential donors.

This entrepreneurial attitude resulted in the school actually overshooting the $50 million goal for its 50-year anniversary campaign. The veterinary school raised $85 million through the campaign between 1995 and 2002.

The current economic situation could impact the school's ability to obtain funding for new buildings, which could, in turn, affect the school's accreditation status, Osburn said. In 1998, the American Veterinary Medical Association placed the school on limited accreditation until it upgrades its facilities. In response, the university launched a $354 million program to upgrade existing facilities and construct new buildings for the school.

The AVMA's Council on Education is expected to return in 2004 to UC Davis to evaluate the progress the school has made in improving its facilities. "We're working on making sure that we have our facilities and funding in place by then," Osburn said. "Looking at the economic climate, we're concerned, but we think we're going to have the instructional facilities piece in place."

Last year the school opened a new Veterinary Medicine Laboratory Facility on Garrod Drive, just southwest of the teaching hospital. A new building for the school's Center for Companion Animal Health to the east of the hospital is nearing completion, and construction of the Veterinary Medicine 3 building, located between the hospital and Tupper Hall, will be under way next spring.

(Editor's note: This is part of an ongoing series of articles examining how campus units are being affected by budget cutbacks.)

Vet med defers hires to ease cuts