Gov. Katie Hobbs demands answers from UA, ABOR over $177M budget shortfall
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The fallout from the University of Arizona’s $177 million budget shortfall has taken a turn this week. Now Gov. Katie Hobbs is pitted against the Board of Regents, which oversees our state’s public universities.
The governor is demanding an in-person meeting with the regents and the UA president Robert Robbins “immediately,” saying they have “failed in their oversight” of the university.
The move follows board chair Fred DuVal sending a cease-and-desist letter to the chair of the UA’s faculty senate after she accused him of a potential conflict of interest.
To make sense of this complicated web, The Show spoke to Ellie Wolfe, who has been covering the story for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.
LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming back on Ellie.
ELLIE WOLFE: Thanks for having me.
GILGER: So the governor seems pretty angry. This was a pretty stark statement she put out earlier this week. What did she say in this, in this letter demanding a meeting?
WOLFE: So as you said, number one, she demanded a meeting. And she also, you know, she wrote that Abor chair Fred DuVal's cease-and-desist letter to the UA Faculty Senate chair Leila Hudson was, you know, not real leadership. She was angry and she says that she feels that ABOR is, has attacked faculty leadership and faculty members. And she wrote and this is of course, me paraphrasing, but she wrote that, you know, instead of attacking faculty and staff that are worried and scared about potential layoffs that ABOR should get out of their "ivory tower" and work on kind of righting the ship at the University of Arizona.
GILGER: So let's get into that in a moment. But tell us first more about what's happening in this conflict between the UA's Faculty Senate and the Board of Regents. One ABOR member called for President Robbins to basically get rid of the Faculty Senate. And then there's this sort of rift between the chair of the Board of Regents, Fred DuVal and the head of the U A's Faculty Senate. What is she accusing him of?
WOLFE: So it's really fascinating. Last week, Dr. Leila Hudson, who's the chair of the UA faculty Senate, accused Fred DuVal in a special faculty Senate meeting of a potential conflict of interest. So Fred DuVal served on the Board of Regents once before, from about 2006 to 2012, I believe. And then he ran for governor and after that, and before he started his second term at the Board of Regents, he was a managing director in a private firm called Amicus Investments. He was listed on the website as recently as April of 2023, which Dr. Hudson found using the Way Back Machine, which is a website that allows you to look at kind of archives of different websites. And she presented those screenshots to the faculty Senate. She said that chair DuVal has been icing her out in conversations. And so she doesn't feel like she can ask this to him and say a phone call because she's saying that she hasn't been able to get in touch with him. And so she said, you know, that she was just posing questions and she said that that was what the faculty Senate is supposed to do. And Chair DuVal's reaction to that was swift and it was harsh, I would say, he hired a lawyer right away. He sent a cease-and-desist letter. The recording of the faculty senate meeting was briefly taken down from the website. It has since returned so everyone can watch it on the UA Faculty Senate website. And he gave his own remarks at an ABOR meeting in Tempe on Thursday. And he stated that it was embarrassing, the level of research that Dr. Hudson had used to come up with this. And he said Amicus was kind of a failed project and that he didn't know why they listed that they had worked with the University of Arizona and Arizona State University on the website. And so it's been really interesting and it's kind of one of two things where either the company Amicus investments had not updated their website in a really long time. And now Chair DuVal is paying the price for that or there is, as Dr. Hudson has implied, something more sinister going on in a potential conflict of interest.
GILGER: OK. So all of this seems to be kind of taking away from the problem at hand here, which is this massive budget shortfall at the University of Arizona. And the governor seems to be pointing that out. What did she say about what needs to be done on that front?
WOLFE: So she didn't give a ton of specifics. She actually we know requested that she meet with the Board of Regents in the UA leadership yesterday. Unfortunately, President Robbins and the interim CFO John Arnold could not do that meeting because they had already had plans to speak to the fact or to the staff council, but they did say that they were meeting with her next week. It'll be a closed-door meeting. So no media and no community members, which is also interesting. ABOR has been doing a lot of that recently and we really don't know what she's going to kind of demand, but she has come aggressively out against ABOR and she has mentioned Chair Fred DuVal by name.
GILGER: I mean, what could happen here though, Ellie? I mean, like the board of Regents is appointed by the governor, the, the, these members were appointed by our last governor. But can the governor change, who's on that board? Can she fire people?
WOLFE: That is a great question and something that we've been working to figure out exactly what she wants to do here. And so we've reached out to the governor's team and so far haven't had a response, I mean, her getting rid of a region, I think would set a very interesting precedent. I don't think that's been done in years if ever. And it would be interesting if she would try to push out Fred DuVal, who's the only Democrat on the board right now. She has the ability to appoint, I believe two new regents because to just finish their term, but because of kind of current conflicts within the state House, she's, we all know, that she's having trouble getting through some nominees for other positions. And so there's a question of whether she'll be able to put who she wants to on ABOR.
GILGER: Last 30 seconds here, Ellie. Very quickly, where do efforts to balance the budget stand at UA right now.
WOLFE: That is another good question. Right now we know that all of the budget units that's 81 and that includes colleges, schools, et cetera, they are having to submit budget plans for a potential 5%, 10% and 15% cut and know more about what actually gets cut in April. And John Arnold stated that, you know, there will be layoffs, but we won't have that information until kind of midway through the spring.
GILGER: All right, we'll leave it there. Ellie Wolfe covering this story for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. Thank you very much.
WOLFE: Thank you for having me.
