PORT ANGELES — Leaders of the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges didn’t hold out much hope that the governor’s proposed 2025-27 budget would include a provision ensuring the system’s 34 schools wouldn’t have to return $28.6 million created by an Office of Financial Management accounting error.

By the time the budget was released on Dec. 17, the board had already moved on to lobbying lawmakers to preserve the funding ahead of the legislative session that begins Jan. 13.

“We were not optimistic that the governor was going to address this OFM error,” Peninsula College President Suzy Ames said. “They just have not been sympathetic to their mistake. They just think that we should pay the money back, even though there’s no possible way we could have ever known that they made that calculation error.”

If their efforts to influence lawmakers fail, SBCTC schools will have to find money in their cash-strapped budgets to pay back their share of the $28.6 million — funds that already were committed to hiring staff, signing contracts and paying for operational expenses when they learned of the error last August.

Peninsula College’s allocation of $339,000 is just 1 percent of its $30 million budget, but it has a direct impact on students by providing essential academic and support service positions.

“There are critical staffing shortages right now that we need in place to serve our double-digit enrollment increases,” Ames said. “At the same, if the Legislature cuts us, we’ll have to find other areas to cut.”

It is a challenge all schools in the system are grappling with, she said.

“This is the worst time to cut colleges when we need to continue to grow,” Ames said. “We’re coming out of low pandemic enrollment rates and we’re trying to serve more students. To cut our budgets at the same time would just cut us off at the knees in that important work.”

Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposed 2025-27 budget already includes an overall reduction of $6.8 million in funding for higher education.

Avoiding a clawback of the funds is the SBCTC’s top legislative priority, ahead of requests of $183 million for funding competitive compensation for faculty and staff and $90 million for operations support.

The SBCTC and its schools will be pushing forward at the same as lawmakers and incoming Gov. Bob Ferguson will be tackling the state’s massive budget hole that is projected to be $10 billion to $12 billion over the next four years.

New contracts with state workers could bring the shortfall to nearly $15 billion.

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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached by email at paula.hunt@peninsuladailynews.com.