With meetings scheduled for both Thursday and Friday of this week, the Board of Regents has become the focal point of both legislative and administrative concerns.

After the board’s Sept. 2 decision to approve the adjustment of salary ranges for University of Wisconsin System leaders, lawmakers decided to introduce three new bills that would alter current policies within the board.

One proposed measure would take away the System’s power to alter salary ranges and instead hand that responsibility to the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee.

The other two bills would work to expand the open-meetings law so that it would not exclude any university departments as it does now, while the other would change the current board vote so that all votes would be met through a roll-call system instead of a voice vote.

Board member Beth Richlen said these measures are a response to the board’s actions regarding salary adjustments and the way in which the approval was met.

Nonetheless, Richlen feels that for the most part, these measures would benefit the Regents.

“Why not make the board more accountable?” she asked.

Board vice-president David Walsh also sees these proposals as a response to the board’s prior decisions and actions.

“The proposed legislations are all reasonable efforts,” he said, adding that he sees more merit in some proposals over others.

While he considers these measures a “valid criticism of our process,” Walsh nonetheless thinks the responses to the board’s actions are somewhat uneducated.

As he noted, the Sept. 2 vote was an issue that the Regents previously deferred. In July of 2002, the board approved half of a 4.2 percent proposed increase for faculty and staff. This issue was then deferred until recently.

“It was that amount that we were voting on in August,” he said.

The issue will once again assume center stage at the board’s meeting this week, since recent analyses have found that the UW System would require annual salary increases of 4 percent in order to remain competitive in the administrative job market.

With budget problems plaguing the system, such numbers are hard to meet, Richlen said.

“We want the best people leading, but it’s so complicated right now. Where should our priorities be when we have so little money?” Richlen said. “It puts us in a really bad place.”

In light of this notion, the UW System has recommended that university leaders, academic staff and faculty consider contributing to their health-insurance coverage just as state employees do. Similarly, the Regents are being encouraged to push unclassified university employees to give the same amount to their health-insurance plans as represented classified employees and teaching assistants do.

In addition, UW System President Katharine Lyall has suggested the board alter its current pay plan so that it works across the board for satisfactory performance if the plan would come to less than 2 percent.

Although the board will vote on the pay plan and benefit-recommendations proposal this week, Walsh is confident that the salary-adjustment issues will also dominant this week’s meetings. However, he is not sure where the Board will take the matter or what the outcomes will be.

Richlen likewise feels it’s necessary to look at the salary-adjustment issue once again because of the way in which the issue was previously handled.