The Daily Agenda: Big bucks at the top of UA

We look at the salaries of senior administrators ... How does $958,000 sound to you? ... Tucson's streets still aren't safe for pedestrians.

Last week, University of Arizona officials finally presented faculty, staff and the public with an actual plan to address the school’s $177 million deficit, saying the cuts would start in administration.

The goal of the “administrative restructuring,” according to Interim Chief Financial Officer John Arnold, is to save money, reduce bureaucracy and improve outcomes. The Arizona Board of Regents has hired a consulting firm to review the UA’s administrative structure and Arnold said UA leadership has already begun to review bureaucratic positions to cut.

Arnold has said that the school is going to restructure and reduce administration, and since the UA is starting at the top, we figured we’d do the same.

Last week, we wrote about the contract and earnings of the man in charge, UA President Robert C. Robbins. Today, we’re diving into the top layer of administrators so you know how much they made in the 2023 fiscal year. Next week, we’ll write about some other things that caught our interest in the UA’s salary database.

If you were wondering whether Robbins had built a bloated office budget, well, it depends on how you look at it. 

The Executive Office of the President employs 10 people with a payroll of $1.9 million. That might sound like 10 high-paying jobs, but half of that is Robbins’ salary of $954,000. After Robbins, the next-highest salary goes to Craig Henderson, the vice president of the office who makes $281,000. Three other employees make a little more than $100,000, while half the employees in the office earn less than that.

But the executive office is just one part of what the UA describes as “senior leadership.” The university put 26 other people in that category, nearly all of whom have “vice president” or “vice provost” in their job titles. Their combined salaries come to $7.5 million.

Some of those in senior leadership are big earners. You probably know a few of those names, such as former Athletic Director Dave Heeke, who made $875,000 before he was fired last month. But you might not have heard of Michael Dake, the senior vice president for health sciences who makes $958,000 (a hair more than Robbins’ salary.)

Dake is a longtime friend of Robbins’ who was hired in 2018 shortly after Robbins became president, despite warnings from a UA cabinet member that Dake wasn’t suited for the position, according to reporting by the Arizona Daily Star’s Carol Ann Alaimo.

Dake went on to fire a health science administrator who was married to the co-chair who warned Robbins, and that employee has since filed a lawsuit against ABOR, claiming discrimination, retaliation and cronyism.

How about Laura Johnson, the senior vice president for legal affairs who oversees litigation involving the UA? She makes $454,000. And Jonathan Dudas, the chief of staff who acts as the university’s point person with the regents and other universities? He also makes $454,000. Those positions could easily slip under your radar. (We looked for scandals that involved them, but came up empty.)

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The UA has yet another layer of senior leadership: the deans who oversee the colleges within the university. The payroll for the 18 deans listed as part of the senior leadership team comes to $6.8 million.

The biggest earner among deans is Michael Abecassis. He is the dean of the College of Medicine and makes $822,000. The salary of Karthik Kannan, the dean of the Eller College of Management, is $620,000. Shane Burgess, the vice president and dean of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences, makes $411,000. The rest of the deans on the leadership team earn at least $200,000.

All told, the payroll for the senior leadership team comes to $16.2 million, not including a half-dozen employees who aren’t in our salary database. Arnold and company could cut all their salaries to zero dollars, and they would still need to cut a lot more to make up for a $177 million shortfall. 

Individual colleges within the UA are already starting to solicit feedback from employees about solutions to the financial crisis, with the budget drafting process for fiscal year 2025 running through April 15.

In the meantime, we’ll keep digging into salary and budget data. With a payroll of $976 million and 12,800 people on staff – including layers upon layers of lower-level administrators we couldn’t get to today – there’s plenty of information for us to work with.

And it’s worth noting that roughly 4,700 of those employees make $50,000 or less a year. The United Campus Workers of Arizona fear that these employees will be the ones who will feel the financial pinch the most when the UA starts to make cuts, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

An outside opinion: Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik wrote in an opinion piece in the Tucson Sentinel that ABOR’s hiring of Huron Consulting to look into the UA’s administrative structure shows that regents see they have some culpability in the current situation and that distance was needed when assessing next steps. Gov. Katie Hobbs has given Robbins and ABOR until Friday to detail the game plan for the path forward.

Unsafe streets: The Arizona Republic’s Sarah Lapidus explores Tucson’s growing rate of pedestrian fatalities and the city’s efforts to make streets safer. Last year, the Tucson Police Department recorded 95 fatal car crashes, five more than the year before. Of those deaths, 29 were pedestrians. The city has taken several steps to address the problem, including moving away from road widening and identifying key strategies to improve pedestrian safety in its Pedestrian Safety Action Plan.

Filling in the gaps: Community and faith-based groups in Nogales are stepping up to help residents pay their rent and utility bills as the cost of living increases and incomes fail to cover basic needs, the Nogales International’s Daisy Zavala Magaña writes. With stringent requirements to receive state and local assistance, residents have turned to local groups for help. The increased cost of living in Nogales has been especially hard for the 27% of residents who live below the poverty line.

Extreme makeover: Tucson Unified School District’s Camp Cooper is getting its first renovation since the 1960s, the Arizona Daily Star’s Jessica Votipka reports. The months-long renovation of the 60-year-old facility will include a new building featuring composting toilets and waterless urinals. The existing restroom will be renovated into a shower house. The project’s other sustainable features include new solar panels, greywater systems and rainwater harvesting to grow shade trees and other natural vegetation.

Better together: The UA and Northern Arizona University have formalized a plan for the schools and industry partners to collaborate on research projects and education partnerships in semiconductor manufacturing, UA News reports. The UA’s Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing launched in May and in November was awarded $35.5 million in funding by the Arizona Commerce Authority to support manufacturing and research. The new agreement also encourages UA and NAU to share research space and equipment and look at ways they can offer courses and professional development programs to industry employees across the state.

Back in court: The suspect in the 2012 kidnapping and murder of 6-year-old Isabel Celis faces his second trial in connection with the case, KGUN’s Craig Smith reports. A jury deadlocked last year during Christopher Clements’ first trial over Isabel’s death after a juror refused to deliberate and wouldn’t vote to convict based on the standard of proof used in criminal trials. Clements was convicted in 2022 of the separate kidnapping and killing of 13-year-old Maribel Gonzalez. Caitlin previously covered Clements’ arrest in 2017 and both of his trials.

1: The inches of rainfall expected in Tucson on Tuesday and Wednesday.