UPDATE: University of Missouri officials take issue with Montee's numbers on lobbying. While Montee said the $900,000 expense referred to outside lobbying contracts, MU officials said the money was for all university lobbying, including salary and benefits of staff members who lobby. The only outside lobbying contract the school has, officials said, was one for $30,000 for University Hospital.
JEFFERSON CITY -- She isn't the first, and won't be the last, but state Auditor Susan Montee added her voice today to those criticizing Missouri's system of higher education governance.
"The approach we have right now doesn't work. Something has to be changed," said Montee, after presenting two audits related to higher education. "If we have everything very fragmented and all of the schools working against each other, we are doomed to fail."
Montee issued two audits today that carried a similar theme: politics is limiting the efficiency of higher education decisions. One audit was on the Lewis and Clark Discovery Initiative, the university building plan pushed by former Gov. Matt Blunt. The initiative used money from the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority to fund about $350 million in capital projects on campuses across the state.
But MOHELA ran short of funding, and Gov. Jay Nixon -- who had opposed the plan -- suspended some of the projects by holding back funding.
Montee's audit questioned how some of the decisions were made to fund capital projects that weren't on university's priority lists, or the statewide building priority list kept by the Coordinating Board for Higher Education.
The second audit examined the coordinating board and found that there is little coordination among higher education institutions. For instance, she found that most of the state's universities spend money on outside lobbying firms, and those universities fight among themselves for the limited state funding.
"We have allowed political influence to play too high a role in this," Montee said.
Her audit found that the University of Missouri, which has lobbyists on staff, spent more than $900,000 on outside lobbying contracts last year.
Under Missouri's system, the universities submit budget requests, and capital expenditure priorities to the coordinating board, which then decides on state priorities among all the submissions. But lawmakers frequently overrule the board.
"They have no teeth," Montee said of the board. "They are making recommendations but they aren't binding."
The Legislature this year debated making changes to the higher ed system, and considered combining the Department of Higher Education with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Nixon and Sen. Charlie Shields, R-St. Joseph, pushed the proposal.
The Senate passed a version of the bill but it died in the House, never making it out of committee.
