PHOENIX - Gov. Fife Symington approved $630 million for the three universities when he approved the $4.8 billion state budget yesterday.

Symington, who publicly criticized the universities' handling of the budget, said his threat to veto the universities' portion of the state budget was a "serious" one.

But in a press conference yesterday afternoon, Symington said he had changed his mind after receiving a letter from the Arizona Board of Regents requesting that the development of "a more collaborative process" for university budget requests. The letter was signed by the nine board members and three university presidents.

Symington said this was what he has wanted since the beginning - to develop a new framework that would include his office and the joint legislative committee.

"I believe we're on the threshold of a new era of cooperation with the universities," he said. "In the end, they held out an olive branch and said 'we want to change this process and work together.'"

Symington had called the universities' original budget proposal increase of $76 million "greedy." He vowed to fight to retain a joint committee's recommendation of an $11.6 million increase rather than a proposed $20 million dollar increase. However, in the end he agreed to accept the legislators' increase of $21.1 million over the last fiscal year.

Symington was given the state budget Tuesday to sign or veto. It would have been automatically adopted after five days if the governor had failed to sign or veto it.

A line-item veto by the governor would have meant that two-thirds of both houses would have to vote to override it.

Symington said he had the support of the Senate but he said it was unlikely he would have received the necessary votes in the House to sustain a veto.

Greg Fahey, UA lobbyist and associate vice president for state relations, said that "all things considered ... it wasn't such a bad year" for the UA, even though he said the university would always like a bigger piece of the state budget.