When appointed as the head of the Spread Pay Task Force, Journalism and Mass Media faculty member Becky Tallent was somewhat overwhelmed by the information she and her team were tasked to sort through.
“We spent the last month gathering information,” Tallent said. “There”s a lot.”
At a Faculty Senate meeting Tuesday, Tallent presented the task force”s updated plan moving forward based on the facts they gathered. Tallent said sorting through the information took so long because there was confusion over what were rumors and what were facts.
Megan Gospe | Argonaut
Faculty Senate Chair Randall Teal moderates a presentation by the Spread Pay Task Force at Tuesday”s Faculty Senate meeting.
Now that they have the information sorted, Tallent said the task force is ready to go further.
Two members of the task force came up with eight suggestions for the University of Idaho to go with, and she said next week the task force will attempt to narrow them down.
Tallent said the primary goal of the new spread pay plan is to ensure that UI complies with Idaho law.
Current Idaho law states that the university may not pay its employees in advance, meaning before August. Yet, UI begins paying some employees earlier in the summer.
James Foster from the College of Science suggested UI look to how its peer institutions handle spread pay to get an idea of how to better address the issue.
Foster said he”s certain UI”s peer institutions do not have to do so much manual intervention to implement spread pay.
“Maybe we can learn something from them,” he said.
Tallent said UI is in a unique position where its constitution was written before the state constitution, causing it to differ at points from Idaho law. This makes it different from other Idaho schools or UI”s peer institutions.
Because of this, UI Provost and Executive Vice President John Wiencek said the university can”t look to its peer institutions in other states, since they are not under Idaho law.
Tallent said she realizes it is unlikely an end result will please everyone involved, but she and the rest of the task force will try to make the right choice. To help with this, the task force plans to have multiple meetings to give UI faculty and staff the opportunity to join the dialogue.
“I want faculty input,” Tallent said. “This is something that is near and dear to our hearts.”
Tallent said she hopes to have a new plan for spread pay finalized by January.
Erin Bamer can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @ErinBamer