Minutes from
UPSA Executive Board Meeting
Thursday, February 13, 2003

Attending:  Pam Houston, Jill Hummels, Kathryn Nemeth-Tuttle, Kathy Stiers, Jeannette Johnson, Mark Nesbitt-Daly, Ola Faucher, Danny Kaiser, Dan Consolver, and Donna Hultine.

Minutes: 

Minutes from the January 9, 2003 Executive Board meeting were approved with one change.

From:  Johnson mentioned the issue of becoming uncoupled with faculty in salary considerations.  As a practice in the past, we would always been considered together.

To:  The issue of becoming uncoupled with faculty in salary considerations was raised again.  As a practice in the past, we would always been considered together.

Treasurer's Report:
Consolver asked that the bill for printing the brochure be sent to him.  Hummels thinks the bill will go directly to him, she thought it would be around $230 for 1,000 copies.

Committees: 

Public Relations: Hummels says the brochure is at the printers and we should have it in time for the meeting with the legislature.  Jill reports that Janet Murguia has asked her to help develop talking points for Kevin Boatright.  There was discussion about sending the brochure to the Regents and possibly making it available to the faculty and putting it on the UPSA Web site. If it was there it could be updated with new photos and profiles.   Houston wondered if it might also be appropriate to provide it to Student Senate and perhaps have someone attend a college chairs meeting or a student senate meeting.  Johnson felt that the chairs already know who we are.  Johnson said her office will have a small supply on hand when conducting national searches. She said it was a struggle for new administrators to understand who we are.  Hummels says we need to keep track of how well the brochure is received. She reminded that a legislator on the Higher Education committee did not like the mention of fraternity advisor.

University Council Report: Nemeth-Tuttle reported that fall break has indeed been moved. 

Ombudsman Search Committee: One name has been forwarded for consideration in the Ombudsman search.

Classified Senate Report: Steiers advised that town hall meetings will be held for all classified employees to get information about the proposal to become university employees.  Houston felt that we needed to look at the implications for unclassified employees.  There was discussion about the block grant and how it works.  She felt that this move would put us all in it together, no one would be lobbying separately but we’d all be asking for an increase for the benefit of all of us.  Faucher mentioned that it might be good to invite Lindy and some of the group working on the proposal so that we can understand the details.

Houston mentioned the idea of having direct representation on the Board of Regents, a notion that Sloan brought up.

Tuttle pointed out that we keep saying we don't have good comparative salary data both university and private sector and we need to take care of that.  She is particularly worried about low salaried unclassified staff.  There was a lot of discussion about getting this information, available from professional associations.  Raiding by PeopleSoft and Johnson County was mentioned.  Johnson had asked Faucher earlier to provide information about unclassified salaries.  Faucher reported the lowest of $5.86 per hour (which she was going to fix right away), an average between $20.37 and $20.85 (depending on whether you included post-docs) and a high of $83.26 per hour.  She said there were 15 people making from $51 to $83 per hour.  We decided that we should include post-docs in the numbers since they are unclassified professionals, and that we would exclude positions we would recruit in a national search.  She was going to do more information gathering.

Tuttle brought up the Planning and Resources Committee and pointed out that if we want input we need to get on the radar.  We had no input in the approval process that departments went through.  She will try to bring up a way for us to forward suggestions for the next round of tuition enhancements.

Governance and Representation: Nesbitt-Daly asked for more bodies to go to the legislature on February 25^th.  He will be working on scheduling different groups at different times with key legislators.  High priority is the majority leader, speaker of the house and presidents and chairs.  The next tier would be new people and key legislators.

He will try to schedule a prep session for one hour on the Monday before the event.

Houston reported that Simons requested an election committee.  A question came up about whether the committee could be any unclassified staff.  Houston said she would ask Simons about it later.

Human Resources Report: No Report

The meeting adjourned at 1:30 p.m.