Wayne Lynch

SUNY Fredonia’s new vice president for finance and administration made it clear this week: His job is to eliminate the campus deficit.

Wayne Lynch told the College Council that he is making changes to accomplish that goal — and acknowledged that the changes will not be comfortable for some people.

His first change involved financial reports. “Our final reports reflected what the campus was seeing from a budgetary standpoint, but were not aligned with what SUNY’s targets were from a budgetary standpoint,” Lynch said. “It’s important that we have a target in a budget that is aligned with our fiscal stability plan, so when we are working with SUNY biweekly, we are talking the same language, saying the same numbers.”

Lynch said the campus is still “off target” on its finances. “We are trending higher than target for deficit spending.”

He stated, “Really, our area of focus will have to be on salaries as we move forward to achieve the numbers” that indicate financial stability.

“We have a significant financial barrier. I don’t want to sugarcoat that,” Lynch said.

He is limiting purchase requests to what is allocated in the campus budget. “You are no longer able to put a purchase requisition in and not have sufficient funding in the budget line and let it go through the system.”

He later added, “80-plus% of our costs are in personnel. … That will be an area of focus, an area of concentration — how do we maximize our staffing on campus?”

Lynch and his office also compared current expenses with preliminary run-throughs of the 2025-26 campus budget and attempted to show potential cuts in each department. “It really is a right-sizing experiment,” he said.

“Current expenses are not reflective of current enrollment,” Lynch said. “Expenses are probably more aligned with about 1,000 more students, give or take. We have to right-size the expenses to the revenue line, there should be no mistake about that. If not, we will lose faith from those in front of us, and much more draconian measures will be put in here.”

SUNY Fredonia President Stephen Kolison lamented that campus officials were dealing with a deficit even before he took office in 2020. He emphasized that the deficit needs to be eliminated so SUNY Fredonia can position itself for the future.

“We are determined to eliminate the deficit,” he said. “That’s not easy. It will create a lot of tension, it will create a lot of complaints. But I hope as council members you will understand the urgency of why we have to do this.”