[CED/CD/EAT] Conscientious Spending on Travel, Food, and Meetings

[Ratje, Jeffrey M - (jmratje)]

Good morning, Business Community and ALVSCE Leadership.  Best wishes on the start of 2024.

This morning, I ask for your assistance to reduce spending on travel, food, and meetings in your unit.  In FY23, for context, ALVSCE spent over $1.3 million on these items in non-sponsored funds.

With the university's cash crunch, these spending categories will become increasingly scrutinized, and indeed have already been highlighted by UArizona Staff Council in a letter to President Robbins.  Staff suggested that reducing this spend by at least 15% is possible without significant disruptions to operations.

While small relative to our overall budget, these items are oversized in their scrutiny.  They are surrogates for how we manage public resources, are places where we have the greatest flexibility over spending, and, therefore, we must be conscientious and fiduciarily responsible with them, just like all funds under our authority.

Possible ways to reduce spending include offering snacks instead of lunch at meetings, holding brown bag lunches instead of catering, holding events on campus instead of at more expensive commercial venues, scrutinizing business reasons for trips and sending only individuals who are absolutely necessary.  There are dozens of other ways that spending can be reduced, and I look forward to your innovativeness.

As an example, my office purchased $44.74 snacks and drinks from Costco for the three-hour December Business Retreat for ~60 people.  This is in place of paying $300 for catering similar snacks.  We placed a table tent at the event (attached).  Doing things like this raise our collective consciousness to the spending that we control every day.

Big things have small beginnings and with your help, we can keep making progress towards our cash goals.  Thank you for your help.


[image0]
Jeff Ratje
Sr. Associate Vice President, Finance Admin Operations
Agriculture, Life and Vet Sciences & Cooperative Extension
(pronounced alv-see...we're more than CALES)
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

Forbes, 314c
PO Box 210036 | Tucson, AZ 85721
Office: 520-621-1468
jmratje at arizona.edu<mailto:jmratje at arizona.edu>
www.compass.arizona.edu<https://www.compass.arizona.edu/>



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