MATT CAPOWSKI/Arizona Daily Wildcat UA president Peter Likins (left) and Provost George Davis discuss campus issues yesterday afternoon in the Duval auditorium at UMC. They answered questions from the audience and discussed issues including employee salaries and the current budget crunch.

Town hall addresses pay, boasts International Genomics Consortium

The UA's top two administrators commented on employee retention and state budget cuts at a public town hall yesterday afternoon, but a pitch for biomedical research dominated the forum.

The forum was the sixth town hall UA President Peter Likins and Provost George Davis have held in Likins' nearly five years as president.

Yesterday's came after months of debates between administrators and state lawmakers concerning budget cuts and salary increases.

While Likins avoided making predictions about whether more UA employees would be laid off this year, he encouraged staff to always be aware of job opportunities elsewhere - budget cuts or not.

Tim Jull, chairman of the Appointed Personnel Organization, asked when salaries for employees who have been with the UA for many years would increase to match starting salaries for their new employees.

"I wonder how this is going to develop if we bring in people who are paid 50 to 60 percent more than the people who are already here," Jull said.

Closing the gap in pay between new and current employees has been Likins' top priority for the past three years, he said, but he acknowledged there has been little success.

He pointed to the reduced salary package passed by the Legislature, which guarantees all full-time UA employees a $1,450 pay raise.

He added that he will work at getting another cost-of-living pay raise for July 2003.

"We're going to take better care of the people who are least well compensated in our workforce," Likins said.

UA and health sciences administrators also spent about an hour explaining and promoting the International Genomics Consortium, a major research group that will study the genetics of diseases like cancer.

The consortium could make Arizona a more appealing locale for new biotechnology business, bringing millions, if not billions, of dollars into the state.

Arizona is competing with Maryland, Georgia and Texas to keep the consortium.

Gov. Jane Dee Hull and Sen. John McCain have both spoken in support for keeping the consortium in Arizona, and Hull has allocated funding that would otherwise be used for tobacco research and education to make a more appealing offer.

The Arizona Board of Regents has already approved a $60 million biotechnology building that could support consortium research, which will be built south of University Medical Center.

But unlike Emory University in Atlanta, the UA has not laid $100 million or any other money on the table to sweeten the offer, Davis said.

Whether Arizona gets the consortium and the prospective projects for UA researchers that come along with it, depends largely on one factor: a man named Jeff Trent.

Trent got his medical degree at the UA and is now the director of intramural research at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

"(The consortium) will probably move its headquarters to wherever Jeff goes," said Dr. Ray Woosley, vice president for health sciences.