Bureaucratic hurdles have led UT administrators to shift federal stimulus funding from construction on campus to paying off gas bills.

UT Budget Director Mary Knight said the $9.9 million allocation of stimulus dollars to natural gas payments awaits the approval of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board — expected sometime this month. The board oversees all public post-secondary institutions in Texas.

UT administrators said they planned to use the federal stimulus money for construction of the new data center near UFCU Disch-Falk Field this summer but were unsure if new guidelines from the coordinating board would affect how the money could be used.

The coordinating board’s new Oct. 30 deadline for non-research funding pushed back the approval date for stimulus projects to two months after Sept. 1, when UT officials expected to have the funds.

UT Chief Financial Officer Kevin Hegarty said that putting the federal money toward salaries would cost too much because of the detailed accounting required.

“I’m not sure it would be worth the monies you would get from the stimulus,” Hegarty said.

Pushing paper

Contradictions in the coordinating board’s guidelines for stimulus proposals also led UT administrators to think the stimulus funds would not be approved for construction purposes. And even as $55 million worth of stimulus dollars for research flowed into University coffers, federal tracking requirements have burdened the office responsible for research projects with countless pages of new administrative work.

In a twist lawmakers may not have intended, the stimulus bill may create employment at UT just to deal with the paperwork involved. Susan Sedwick, the director of the Office of Sponsored Projects, which is responsible for tracking federal dollars, said the office will likely have to create a new position just to keep up with the new reporting requirements.

Texas lawmakers appropriated stimulus money for public universities in the Legislature’s bi-annual budget last spring.

The appropriations required the schools to simply submit a spending budget for general stimulus funds to the governor’s office and legislative budget board in September. Randy Wallace, associate vice chancellor, controller and chief business officer said the UT System did just that.

“We thought that was all the requirements that were going to be needed,” Wallace said.

But in late September, the governor’s office added a new layer to the approval process by assigning the Higher Education Coordinating Board the task of tracking federal stimulus dollars across the state at universities, community colleges and academic health centers.

The coordinating board’s deadline for the final proposals was Friday, two months after many UT institutions expected to have the money for spending projects. The board will approve proposed uses of stimulus funds sometime this month.

Wallace said UT-Austin, UT-Dallas, UT-San Antonio, UT-Southwestern Medical Center and the UT Health Science Centers in Houston and San Antonio are all waiting on special funding for projects. At the UT School of Law, administrators had planned on paying for a $420,000 expansion of the law school clinic with stimulus funds that have yet to arrive, Knight said.

Confusing guidelines

The board’s new guidelines were contradictory, causing some confusion among UT budget planners about how the money could be spent. On one page of the new guidelines, the board forbids the use of stimulus funds for modernization, renovation and repairs — and then allows them on another page of the same guidelines.

Mark Zafereo, the coordinating board’s interim federal stimulus funding coordinator, said using the money for modernization, renovation and repairs is allowed. The notification forbidding the use was an error, he said.

Of the $55 million in stimulus money for research, more than half is going to the College of Natural Sciences. This money is given on an individual basis by organizations including the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation and has strained the resources of the Office of Sponsored Projects at UT.

The office is tasked with keeping track of the federal money and the number of jobs it creates and retains. Sedwick said that keeping track of the new statistics would require additional staff and information technology support.

Welcomed funds

For those the money has already reached, the effects have been significant. Paul Barbara is the principal investigator at the UT Energy Frontier Research Center, which received $13 million in federal stimulus money. The center will use the money to pay the salaries of about 30 graduate and postdoctoral students, as well as pay for the graduate students’ tuition and any research supplies.

Eighteen UT faculty will collaborate on the project with the goal of understanding the molecular processes that influence the performance of new energy materials, such as those seen in solar cells and batteries for all-electric vehicles. Barbara said the collaboration would have been impossible without the grant, and that the real economic benefits will come years down the line.

“The inventions made 20 to 30 years ago are the ones that change everybody’s lives today,” Barbara said.

Pharmacy professor Andrea Gore said that a two-year $841,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health had revived one research program that had gone without funding for about a year. Gore said the timing of the grant for her research into the effects of environmental contaminants on the reproductive and neurological development of multiple generations couldn’t have been better.

She said the dual purpose of economic stimulus and scientific discovery was welcome after the past eight years.

“As long as we’re carefully tracking [the money], I don’t think it’s an undue burden,” Gore said.