Despite the budget cuts the University System of Georgia is facing, the University of West Georgia is planning to go ahead with raises for its staff, according to a letter from the university president to its employees.

“The University of West Georgia strongly stands by its earlier recommendation that we retain our commitment to all previously announced raises,” University President Beheruz Sethna wrote in the letter.

That goes against the order that no state employees receive raises, but both the university and the university system felt that not going through with the raises would be a mistake.

The university faculty signs formal contracts that set the salaries, and those contracts are legally binding. The staff depends on merit raises doled out in January for increases.

Not giving out the raises to the staff, while the faculty had received theirs would create a kind of tier employment system at the institutions, said John Millsaps, spokesman for the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.

“We wanted to be consistent across the system. We want to basically sustain morale,” Millsaps said. “The only people who will not be receiving any sort of increase this year are all employees of the Board of Regents office here. We’re in the same category as all other state employees.”

The university sent out letters to the employees last June detailing how much their raises would be, an average of 2.5 percent, he said. The salaries including the raises were figured well before the economy started to head downward.

“Then the budget woes hit the state and as the summer went on, the budget woes got worse and worse,” Sethna said. “At some point the question arose whether we would have the money to fulfill the raise intentions that we made. ... Were we going to be able to deliver on this?”

The governor asked all state agencies to cut their budgets by 6 percent, but state revenues continued to decline. Now the university system has cut another 2 percent of its budget through a temporary fee for students and increased employee contribution to their health-insurance premiums, in anticipation of more cuts once legislators amend the budget in January.

However, the university administration felt strongly that the raises should go through as promised.

“We are not taking a gloom-and-doom attitude with this budget cut,” Sethna said. “There may be a one-year downturn. There may be a two-year downturn, but the future of this institution is a great one and we are going to take the positive attitude.”

That commitment comes at a significant cost. The raises will cost the university $757,509. But that money is well spent for employees who are being asked to do more with less, Sethna said.

In response to the budget cuts, the university has left less-critical open positions unfilled, leaving existing employees to pick up the slack. In addition, there are still layoffs in the maintenance department on the table as the university waits to see what enrollment figures and tuition revenue will be next semester.

“(Employees) are literally doing far, far more with far, far less,” Sethna said. “They are serving more students with frozen budgets or decreasing budgets. They are really making the institution work.”

The employees are also being asked to shoulder more of the cost of their health care. The Board of Regents of the university system has twice increased the amount of health insurance premiums that employees are required to pay. Last week, the board voted to increase the percentage employees would have to pay to 30 percent of their premium - up from 25 percent - an increase of $17 to $65 a week depending on the plan and the number of people covered.

In order to maintain a positive attitude on campus, the raises, which are really a reward for a job well done, should go on as planned, Sethna said.

“The raise that you obtain is someone’s assessment of an attaboy or attagirl,” he said. “The people who are doing this exceptional work, we can’t expect them to carry the weight of this increased student workload on their shoulders and then tell them that we don’t value their services.”

The raises will take effect Jan. 1, 2009.