WILL UT PROBE INTO PRESIDENT'S RAISES COME TO UTB?

By Juan Montoya
There is an uproar over generous pay raises that University of Texas at Austin President Bill Powers and 20 professors received because the increases – $325,000 in extra compensation for himself alone while he was a law school dean  – were not properly authorized.
The Austin American-Statesman reported that UT rules would have required then-Chancellor Dan Burck in 2001 to authorize the money that Powers received from a charitable foundation that supports the law school.
That investigation has made some people wonder whether the investigation into Powers' raise will snowball into a probe that will also look at questionable raises by other UT System presidents.
In the supplements to the 2010-2011 budget passed pro forma by the TSC board was a $38,726 raise to Julieta Garcia. What rankled many at the time was that Garcia gave herself the raise while the UTB departments were under the gun to institute system-wide budget reductions.
And, since the salary increase was never disclosed to TSC trustees, they routinely approved the transfer of TSC funds not knowing they were giving Garcia additional money.
"It was never brought before us as a raise when we voted for the budget," said one. "We never knew that hidden within all those routine transfers was a raise for the president. It was included in the UTB budget as a transfer from TSC."
The raise, tucked away on page G.38 of the University of Texas at Brownsville Budget, includes a Supplemental Compensation appendix prepared by Marilyn Woods, Garcia's Executive Assistant. The transfer is from the TSC contract designate line item in the sum of $38,726 to be added to the $322,685 paid her in the 2009-2010 budget.
In that same summary is a notation of salary roster from the English Department that indicates that some of the money that goes to her salary was taken from that department. In other words, part of her salary and raise was taken from instruction to give her what (in her eyes) was a well deserved raise.
In Powers' case, the deferred compensation agreement was approved in 2001 by the university's president and its chief lawyer. An executive vice chancellor at the system was informed of the agreement, but the newspaper reported that officials could produce no record showing that the chancellor's office had authorized it.
The Statesman reported that there have been no suggestions that the foundation's payments to Powers and law professors broke the law. But a 2012 report by the UT system general counsel concluded that because the payments bypassed the university's payroll system, salaries were not accurately reported internally or to the public.
That seems to have also been exactly the case of the Garcia raise.