Perry to TSU: Shape up or else

We noted yesterday that interim TSU President J. Timothy Boddie Jr. had been in Austin making the case for $25 million in emergency money from the Legislature. But the story that came out later in the day was far more interesting: Gov. Rick Perry has given TSU's regents about a month to come up with a solid financial plan — or quit.

Perry was reportedly shocked by the financial state of the university as reflected in a report from its interim CFO, Carin Barth, which showed that the numbers are pretty bad: The school owes more than $34 million for construction projects, but has no way to pay; it needs to spend $54 million on capital improvements, including getting standing water out of the basements of three buildings and fixing visible cracks in the new student recreation center; there are $2.6 million in missing and over-budget purchase orders; the athletics program is $2 million over budget; not enough fees are being collected to pay the debt on new dorms, parking lots and a shuttle bus system; and the university has spent $2.5 million that wasn't in its budget and hired 190 employees that weren't approved by the state; and there are $500,000 in "critical" information technology projects that aren't budgeted. Other than that, we assume everything's just fine.

This is far from the first time the state has told TSU to shape up or else: In 1989, the state threatened to take the school over if it didn't fix "gross financial mismanagement" but backed off the next year; then, in 1996-97, lawmakers found rampant mismanagement of financial aid and again threatened to put TSU under one of the state university systems if things didn't improve by 1998. The result of that: In 1999, auditors found that not much had improved at TSU, but again, the state did nothing — partly because of the school's then-new president, Priscilla Slade, who turned out to be a whole new problem herself.

Interestingly, the TSU regents seem to have had little idea the university was having any financial problems. "I'm not going to say [school officials] lied. I'm saying we didn't get a correct snapshot, so I'm going to push it to them now that we do get a correct snapshot of what's going on here at TSU," Regent Harry Johnson told KTRK. "I think, like anybody else, it's time for us to correct it." The question, of course, is how: TSU has said it'll get itself out of the hole without raising tuition, but it's not clear whether the Legislature is going to want to toss $25 million more into a financial black hole. And there's talk once again about making TSU part of one of the state university systems, which is already drawing opposition from Houston legislators Rodney Ellis and Garnet Coleman. What seems clear is that Perry won't take the same old line: "It can't be a Mickey Mouse deal," the governor's spokesman, Robert Black, told the Chronicle. "It can't be a Band-Aid." We'll see.