Cerritos College passed an adopted budget Oct. 6.

Two days before the end of a historic 100-day delay of the California state budget for the 2010-11 fiscal year was passed Friday by legislators in Sacramento.

Community Colleges across the state have missed out on an estimated $840 million in operating funds since the budget deadline was missed on July 1, according to the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.

Eduardo Iniguez, commissioner of budget and finance for the Associated Students of Cerritos College, was one of the students affected last month after Cal Grants didn’t arrive as a direct result of the state budget limbo.

“I have bills,” Iniguez said. “As an accounting major, I budget my whole semester through financial aid and the Cal Grant.

I was left empty-handed,

I had to cut on a lot of stuff and stay here at school extra hours, not go home till later, that way I don’t have to be coming back and forth wasting gas.”

He then added, “Food-wise, I was just looking at the dollar-menus,”

According to Iniguez, Cerritos College receives funding based on its Effective Full-Time students, which refers to students taking 12 units or more.

Iniguez said that within the first month of a class about 25 to 30 percent of students will have already dropped.

“At the end of the year our EFT’s are low, because they only look at [the students who] actually finish the courses.

“We have 24,000 students, but not all of them are full-time so they count the EFT’s and that’s the budget they give us and based on that we have the budget for more classes or less classes.

“So it’s going to continue, the same cycle, as long as we keep on having the students drop out and not give room to people who are actually serious,” Iniguez said.

David El Fattal, vice president of business services and assistant superintendent, said that Cerritos College would be working through the process of implementing the newly adopted state budget into the Cerritos College budget over the next several weeks.

“I’m expecting that we will not get 100 percent of our apportionment moneys right now, but we should get something soon,” El Fattal said.

He explained that Cerritos College had an Oct. 15 deadline to pass the 2010-11 adopted budget; one month longer than the traditional Sept. 15 deadline because of the budget crisis.

“For the last seven or eight years, it’s been the worse in school finance for the last 40 years,” El Fattal said.

El Fattal has been impressed with Cerritos College in handling the budget crisis.

“I think it’s been absolutely phenomenal that people seem to be pulling their oars all in the same direction,” El Fattal said.

“Every constituent group on this campus I think is working hard toward helping ensure to the greatest degree possible that students aren’t impacted by the fiscal crisis that is going on and I think overall we’re doing a great job achieving that, even though it’s very difficult to manage.”

The appropriations that Cerritos College must work with, first have to be analyzed by the state, and then the Chancellor’s office releases that information to community colleges.

Some of the money that is intended towards Cerritos may be deferred by the state until the next fiscal year.

“The state is supposed to be giving us approximately $69 million. They’re gonna withhold approximately $19 million by our initial analysis, which that number might change as more information comes from Sacramento.

“If that’s true, if the $19 million deferral [takes place], it’s basically ‘we owe you the money, we’re gonna give it to you the next year.”

He elaborated, saying that the deferral would account for nearly 27 and a half percent withholding of funds.

“And you think about that, how that would apply to your job if all of the sudden whatever money you were making, whatever your income level they said ‘well, keep working the same way but we’re gonna hang on to 27 and a half percent of it and we’ll give it to you about a year from now,'” Fattal said.

Mark Wallace, director of public and governmental relations and public affairs, said shortly before the budget was passed that the delay is probably the worst they’ve ever seen.

“We’re very fortunate here because we’ve been fairly conservatively managed over a lot of years so we’ve been able to have healthy reserves that have gotten us through this, whereas other districts are already borrowing funds from outside of their organization,” Wallace said.