(Mouse click on image to enlarge it.)
This morning’s Coeur d’Alene Press skewspaper had an article by Maureen Dolan headlined The cost of declining enrollment.
According to the article, “NIC President Joe Dunlap and Athletics Director Al Williams pointed to the enrollment drop [at NIC] when they recently recommended that the college switch from a national athletics conference to a less costly regional community college sports association. The trustees will meet Thursday to decide whether to follow that recommendation, a move expected to chop an estimated $600,000 per year from the college budget.”
OpenCdA doesn’t prefer one athletic conference over another, but since the tap dancing duo of Dunlap & Williams has focused on the savings that would result from moving from the national conference to the regional one, we would suggest they and the Board of Trustees take a look at our OpenCdA post on June 23, 2011. It was titled simply $6,720,029.87.
As noted in our 2011 post, $6,720,029.87 was the amount of prepaid “rent” money NIC failed to even try to recover from the NIC Foundation after NIC had become the owner of the property. The detailed explanation of why NIC should have sought that refund is in the 2011 post. The quick-and-dirty version is that when NIC paid off its “rent” early, it accepted the deed and became the owner of the property. So in effect and in fact, NIC continued to pay “rent” to the NIC Foundation on land NIC already owned.
Recovering that “rent” paid after NIC took ownership, $6,720,029.87 paid as “rent” on land it already owned, might help resolve the athletic conference issue.