Over the past couple of weeks, several stories have come out of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, as financial woes - and their impacts - have been revealed.
UL Interim President Jamie Hebert announced the university is facing at $25 million deficit. In a letter to employees, he announced the closure of the Office of Sustainability and Community Engagement, and administrative restructurings in the Office of Communications and Marketing and in the Office of Auxiliary Services - a loss of six positions.
Our reporter attended a town hall meeting last week; Hebert told attendees that administrators were trying to cut 10 percent of expenses, and that additional "human impact" was inevitable. The interim president told the UL Lafayette community that the administration’s goal is to reach fiscal stability by May 2026. While resolving the budget deficit is expected to take years, Hebert emphasized the importance of preserving the university’s mission.
During our work on these stories, we went to the university's website to take a look at the budget, which was not available online. There's a copy you can view in person in the library, and a free scanner to copy it, but we thought it would be easier for our viewers if the budget was available online.
The posting of budgets isn't universal and all agencies that do it don't use the same formats. But we did some checking and the University of Louisiana at Monroe has their budget online; you can see it here. LSU has parts of its budget online for this year and several past years; you can see that information here. Closer to home, LCG has its budget online and has done so for decades. You can see it here. The Lafayette Parish School System also has posted its entire budget online for years; you can see those here.
We got an electronic copy of the budget from the University of Louisiana System, and we're posting it here for you to read if you want to see what's in it.
Here's the budget:
