Lane Community College Education Association

Your LCCEA Bargaining Team meets with the College today at 1:00-4:00 in 2/214. All faculty are welcome to attend bargaining sessions, all or any part of a session, as silent observers.

LCC Faculty Colleagues –

Your LCCEA Bargaining Team Leads met on May 8 for its first “real” bargaining session where we exchanged proposals that were the first part of a four-part series of initial proposals by each party in accordance with our ground rules. Other proposals exchanged so far are also posted here on the blog.

We presented Part A of our initial package proposal (below), which is the section focused on student needs. In addition, we presented our proposal that the contract be a seven-year agreement with the economics set for the first three years, followed by two economic reopeners for two years each, as well as a proposal that the full contract utilize gender neutral language.

The Student Needs section includes: 

• Increase support for student basic needs (i.e. food, housing, safe physical campus spaces); 
• Ensure adequate staffing for student services (i.e., counseling/mental health, advising, tutoring) 
• Reduce costs for students (i.e. textbook markup reduction, OER support, tuition waiver for DACA and undocumented students); 
• Expand sanctuary campus provisions and use LCC Alert when ICE is on campus; 
• Improve safety of physical campus (e.g., sufficient emergency call boxes); 
• Provide sufficient restrooms (i.e. more than one restroom stall per building); 
• Make campus more inclusive (i.e., sufficient gender neutral restrooms, open worship spaces, lactation spaces, complete a study of LCC name);
• Provide an instructional specialist in classes with significant percentage of students with ADA accommodations; and
• Create an appeal process for accommodations that fundamentally alter course. 

The College’s proposal (also below) includes:

• A contract in effect for two years only;
• A “complete agreement clause,” which would eliminate all previous agreements about the meaning of the contract (i.e., past practice) and would eliminate all MOAs not negotiated or incorporated into the new agreement;
• New provisions for “budget exigency” which would allow the College to open the contract and renegotiate salaries at any time if any one of the ten circumstances they proposed were triggered, all ten of which would be determined by the Administration alone;
• Establishment of accrual families for the Florence campus for part-time faculty seniority, which would include classes taught in Florence and also classes taught entirely online, which have no physical location;
• Establishment of the Oregon residency requirement for all faculty with no exceptions.

As you can see, the proposals are wildly disconnected and quite distant at this early point. 

Your faculty bargaining team leads are dedicated to achieving the best contract to meet faculty and student needs.

Thank you to the many faculty who attended today’s session to observe in person and on Zoom!

All bargaining sessions are scheduled in building 2, room 214, including TODAY! Upcoming dates are as follows.

1. May 29, 1-4
2. June 5, 1-4

We look forward to seeing you soon.

Your LCCEA Bargaining Team Leads,

Gerry Meenaghan

Adrienne Mitchell

April Myler

Peggy Oberstaller

Ryan Olds

Russell Shitabata

Kellen Wilson

LCC Faculty Colleagues,

Please find below and attached essential information about the proposed FY26 budget. The Budget Committee, comprised of Board of Education members and their 7 community member appointees, will be meeting again today at 5 p.m. in the Boardroom.

In particular, please note the following.

It is entirely possible to balance the budget in a more reasonable, realistic, accurate manner, which the Administration, including all of the highest ranking administrator positions, and all stakeholder groups did collaboratively and with unanimous agreement just two weeks prior to the May 7 release of the dramatically changed budget.

Unfortunately, the Administration has already provided notice yesterday of one faculty retrenchment to take effect in Winter 2026 and appears to be implementing one partial retrenchment for next year as well. This is not necessary and is the direct result of the Administration adding excess expenditures, excess expense estimates and newly created positions as well as by making significant other changes to the proposed budget in a two week period prior to May 7, which create a budget that would use $3.1M in reserves, rather than presenting a balanced budget for the Board and Budget Committee to consider.

In solidarity,

Adrienne

Forecast Modeling Tool–FY25-29 a/o 05/01/25 BDS