Thompson Rivers University tabled a budget of about $252 million last month, but that will change thanks to the pandemic.

Vice-President of Administration & Finance Matt Milovick says with Universities being declared an essential service and with the majority of its workforce working from home, it knows that it has salary continuation commitments until the end of the month.

“And there’s further discussions about how much further into the future that will go and what that might mean. So we’re looking at all of that and there’s no question that labour takes up the biggest part of our budget, so we’ll see, it is factored into all of our various planning scenarios.”

Speaking on The Jeff Andreas Show, Milovick says the extent of budget changes will depend on how the COVID situation unfolds.

“The crystal ball has never been as fuzzy as it is right now. I couldn’t imagine a more imperfect planning environment. So it certainly creates some challenges as we try to anticipate what COVID is going to do to us, not only in the summer, but also in the fall and winter.”

“We do know that the budget we put together at the start of March is not going to be the budget that we end up with. The extent of those changes are really going to depend on how the COVID situation unfolds and what it does to enrollments and specifically international enrollments and will international students be able to leave their home country, get their visas and come here and start studying.”

Milovick says the priorities for capital work include finishing the Nursing and Population Health Building which is on time for substantial completion in this month and then there is a whole lot of outfitting that needs to happen over the summer.

“We weren’t going to let this situation stand in the way of that because that needs to open in September. But, we had about $11 million in other capital projects that we were planning to do and I think we scaled that back to probably somewhere around $2 million. We’ve got to reconstruct the road between science and the nursing building and turn that into a pedestrian walkway and given that it’s already torn up we view that as a priority. We’ve go to rebuild the parking lot there.”

Milovick says it’s less than 20 per cent of the capital work that it would have done had things gone according to plan.

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