NIU is one step closer in shaping next year’s budget after Thursday’s Board of Regents meeting.

The Regents approved a total operating budget request of $262.2 million for the three Regency schools. This represents a budget request increase of $15.7 million or 6.4 percent over this year’s budget.

The requested increase is modest when compared to the past when the Regents asked for “pie-in-the-sky” double-digit percentage increases. It also represents a shift in Regents’ strategy to be more reasonable with their budget requests.

NIU’s portion of the budget request is $130 million. NIU’s budget this year is $122 million.

Regents Chancellor Roderick Groves called the requests “a bare bones budget.”

However, the budget does include a request for faculty raises of somewhere between 4.5 and 5 percent.

Groves said the raise “represents a herculean effort by the universities in reallocation to salary increases.”

The budget request also includes $300 per faculty member to offset last year’s increased medical costs. NIU President John La Tourette covered NIU employees’ increased insurance costs last semester.

Capital appropriations requests were also approved by the Regents. Among these was $6.5 million for equipment for the long-frozen College of Engineering building. The building has been approved for years but Gov. Edgar froze the money for it.

The budget requests will be sent to the Illinois Board of Higher Education, who will present its recommendation in January.

In other action, the Regents approved a $387,000 architectural bid for a new Center for Black Studies building. A new center will be built since the old one will be demolished to make room for a parking facility.

The contractor is Wendell Campbell, whom Regent David Murphy said is a minority.