Board of Regents to Consider Proposed Budget Friday

PULLMAN, Wash. – The Board of Regents of Washington State University will consider the university’s 2005-2007 proposed budget during the board’s regularly scheduled meeting to begin at 9 a.m. Friday (Nov. 18).

The meeting will be held in Ballroom E-F of the Marriott Seattle Waterfront Hotel, 2100 Alaskan Way, in Seattle. The agenda for the meeting is available online at https://www.regents.wsu.edu/Agendas-Notices/051118Agenda.doc . Board of Regents committees will meet Thursday at the Marriott.

Fifty new faculty positions at WSU campuses statewide will be funded through the budget. It also includes funding for a salary increase averaging 3 percent on Sept. 1, 2006 for faculty, administrative and professional staff and graduate students. Proposed salary increases for classified staff will vary by group.

New faculty positions will allow the university to keep pace with enrollment growth in Pullman and Spokane, to expand programs at WSU Tri-Cities and to establish new lower-division programs at WSU Vancouver.

Regents will consider several naming issues. One proposal would rename the New Library on the WSU Pullman campus as the Terrell Library, in honor of former WSU President W. Glenn Terrell, who led the university from 1967 to 1985. The board will also consider renaming the WSU Vancouver Student Bookstore as the Firstenberg Student Commons, in honor of Ed and Mary Firstenberg.

The board also will consider a lease with Battelle/Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, which will occupy part of the Biosciences Engineering Laboratory to be built on the WSU Tri-Cities campus.

Also on the agenda is approval of the sale of property in Honolulu that was gifted to WSU by the Gladys Moss estate. The sale price is $2.15 million.

Later Friday, the regents will hold a joint meeting with the University of Washington Board of Regents to discuss the universities’ cooperative efforts to focus on the role that university research plays in enhancing economic development in Washington. The meeting is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. in Walker-Ames Room 300, Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus.