Budgeting in Illinois has become a complicated field in the past few years, but William Weber volunteered to be Eastern’s budget master.

Weber is an associate vice president for Academic Affairs, but he stepped into the limelight last October when Budget Director Jim Shonkwiler retired. As interim budget director, Weber had to coordinate department financing throughout the campus and file reports with the state of Illinois.

“The budget office interacts with all areas of the university,” Weber said. “It may not always be clear who needs to know about a change that we’re considering doing or who may have the (required) information.”

Weber’s interim duty concludes on July 1 when a newly hired director takes over.

“We’re working on it,” said Paul McCann, director of Business Affairs. “We think we’re going to have something to announce fairly shortly, but we still have a few things to sort through.”

McCann said hiring Weber as the interim budget director wasn’t a tough decision, despite having worked 20 years in the Academic Affairs department.

“For the Provost, he’s worked a lot in the budgeting area and helped develop the budget for the Academic Affairs area,” McCann said. “So he was a natural when we started looking around for people with experience in the university.”

Weber happened to be curiously interested.

“Basically, it is a position that was of interest to me that I wanted to learn more about,” Weber said. “I already knew a lot about the budget, especially from the appropriated side, from my work with Academic Affairs. I wanted to get more of a university-wide perspective on the budgeting process.”

His responsibilities as an associate vice president included being director of summer sessions, being a liaison to the faculty development department, and budget management.

“When you look at the money we get from both state taxes and tuition, Academic Affairs represents about two thirds to three quarters of that budget,” Weber said.

Faculty salaries were a considerable element of his budget responsibilities.

“One thing that I do on a normal, routine basis is estimating what it’s going to cost the university to fund faculty salary increases,” Weber said. “If I’m too far off in my estimates, that could cause some consequences.”

He said the current faculty budget is $ 38 million and some of his projections would be for years in advance.

“When you’re looking at the faculty salary base, you’re dealing with large sums of money,” Weber said. “It’s a little intimidating when you realize you’re dealing with six, seven, eight figures.

The transition

Weber said he hoped his responsibilities in the Academic Affairs office would overlap enough for him to do both jobs.

“The agreement we made at the beginning was that I would try to spend about two-thirds of my time on the budget director side,” Weber said. “We thought that would be doable because some of the responsibilities overlapped.”

He had to relinquish his responsibilities as liaison to the faculty development office.

“I continued with summer sessions in particular because we’re in the middle of a few changes that I didn’t feel like I could simply drop,” Weber said.

McCann said Weber noticeably became busier and appointments with him became hard to come by. However, Weber said he never took work home with him because he felt a separation of mindsets was needed.

“I think because he’s doing two jobs, there is some pressure on him,” McCann said. “If you ask the previous budget director, he was pushed to make sure that there was money there and that it was analyzed.”

Playing with the big boys

McCann said much of that pressure came from government officials because most inquires were funneled through the budget office.

“There are a lot of questions that the governor and legislators can dream up and they expect answers immediately,” McCann said. “So there is pressure at times to come up with the right answer.”

Having only one person answer questions keeps a level of professionalism instead of making politicians call a phone tree, McCann said.

Having to answer to the governor’s office and the Illinois Board of Higher Education was one of the most difficult and important parts of the job, Weber said.

“Narratives are included in reports in which legislators ask for information such as organizational charts, programmatic priorities, board information, and so on,” Weber said.

“Gathering massive amounts of information and putting it into readable narratives was a difficult task,” Weber said. “I found that I needed my writing skills over here more then my mathematical skills.”

When working with his number analysts, Weber said he quickly had to learn the power of executive decision.

“You need somebody to make certain decisions at crunch time when the question may not be as specific as you like,” Weber said.

The end is near

Weber was one of the seven applicants who applied to be the new budget director. However, he was not one of the three finalists. The chosen candidate will relieve Weber on July 1.

“He considered applying and he ended up withdrawing his application because, I think, he saw that it just wasn’t what he wanted to do,” McCann said.

“It’s still not a position that I rule out for someday in the future,” Weber said. “When I came into the position, I came in thinking it might be a good post retirement job for me sometime at some place, not necessarily at Eastern, once I retire from here.”

Eastern stopped accepting applications in mid-January and three of the remaining candidates were interviewed in April.

“After my time here I still think that, but the budget director position here simply wasn’t the right job for me at the right time,” Weber said. “After considering everything, I’ve decided that it’s not the best route. It was a very difficult decision.”

Weber said the job is definitely one of those key positions that could lead to higher promotions within the university, but he’s comfortable with his associate vice president job.

“My commitment runs through June,” Weber said. “So for the first half of July, I have a two week vacation scheduled and I’ll be on a cruise.”

Rick Kambic can be reached at 581-7942 or at rwkambic@eiu.edu.

Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs William Weber is currently the interim budget director for EIU. As of July 1, Weber’s duties as interim budget director will end and a new budget director will be named at that time. (Robbie Wroblewski/The Dail

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