During its March meeting, Citrus’ Board of Trustee approved a $450,000 transfer of funds into Citrus’ transportation fund from its reserve.
The California Community College Chancellor’s Office said a reserve is funds a college sets aside for “an unanticipated decline in revenue or an increase in expenditures.”
“The Transportation Budget was $159,750 prior to the board approved increase. Now, after the increase, the budget is $609,750,” Wade Ellis, Citrus’ director of fiscal services, said in an email.
The Budget Transfers and Revisions Recap from the meeting said the transfer was “to to cover the increased costs of districtwide transportation, including chartering, repairs, and vehicle maintenance.”
Shawn Jones, a director of business services at Citrus, said everything is much more expensive than it used to be.
“Gas is up like 40% from what it used to be,” Jones said. “The cars cost like three times what they used to cost.”
Jones said the school rents a lot of vans for athletics and the performing arts.
“It’s a good thing,” Jones said. “Our athletes are doing better so they’re going more places and their teams have gotten a little bigger.”
Citrus’ associate director of fiscal services Marie Noriega said that the school’s emerging theater technologies program has grown a lot.
Noriega said after the pandemic Citrus had to find out where it stood regarding transportation after it mostly during the pandemic.
In the almost four years she’s been at Citrus, Noriega said that, to her knowledge, the college has not pulled funds from its reserves to cover transportation.
She said it’s not unusual for the college to pull that much money out of its reserves as long as there’s a “valid reason for it.”
“If there’s something that the college needs in order to continue … moving forward, then of course that’s something we would look at our reserves for,” she said.
