The Los Angeles Pierce College Council convened on Thursday to discuss the schedule of upcoming projects and adjustments to make on the budget.
Project Director Andre Haghverdian prepared a brief schedule to show at the meeting to keep the board informed on the status of all the projects taking place on campus.
“We are working on transformer issues we had at the music building. We got the contractor on board and we are working to troubleshoot and find out what the issue is with the transformer that is powering the music building. We will find out how substantial the issue is when tests are concluded,” Haghverdian said. “The project for the demolition of the library is almost complete except for some electrical equipment that we are receiving in December and February. We are hoping to finish that project by April.”
Pierce Vice President Rolf Schleicher admitted he had some concerns about the budget for the academic school year. He explained that looking at the budget should be important because there isn’t enough revenue being generated. The goal of money that we get will become the revenue, that means there will be nothing left over for the staff to get raises if they don’t hit those metrics.
“I am concerned about our performance based model. I have expressed that in many forms,” Schleicher said. “If you are using money and resources and it is adding no value to the skiff model and we aren’t seeing that tie in, then we have a problem. I think the district has a problem right now in the way they are allocating money potentially to us under this model, so we really have to understand this model more.”
Schleicher also emphasized the need for a thorough grasp of the college’sresource utilization. Any deviation from an efficiently performing state will have adverse personal consequences for all involved. Additionally, it will hinder our overall performance and our efforts to advance the students’ agenda, as this model is heavily student-centric. The state dictates the framework which includes various metrics. The budget committee is going to be important working with everybody else to understand how we can drive what we are doing to be more successful.
“We need to make sure we are investing appropriately and looking at how we bring in those funds based on timing as well because we might achieve the goals but if you achieve it at the same time you might not get the double revenue component you could get if you spaced it out,” Schleicher said. “There are ways of maximizing the model and we’re gonna have to be a lot more fluent in terms of how we express ourselves in terms of resource allocation.”
Co-Chairman Sean McDonald provided updates about hosting events at the Great Hall.
“We are currently working on the technology masterplan for the campus. We finally have most of the members. We haven’t officially started our first meetings yet, so we will start to work on that,” McDonald said. “There was some discussion about the status of the Great Hall. I know currently it is being used as a space for music, but they have finished up the final programming and they will be training on how to use that for people who want to use the Great Hall for events.