City College has received federal stimulus money from President Obama’s recovery package, although the amount is significantly less than originally anticipated.

“[The recovery money] is only 25 percent of what we were originally supposed to get,” Joe Sullivan, vice president of Business Services, said.

City College has received $303,964 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly known as the stimulus package passed in February.

Sullivan said that City College originally was set to receive $1.2 million from the stimulus package, but the state instead allocated most of the money to the UC system, Cal States, and K-12 programs. Thus, California community colleges “took the brunt of it.” The state is required to fund community colleges up to a certain amount, and after that minimum amount is reached, no more funding is required.

The $6 per unit tuition increase in July came directly to City College, so the state decided not to give anymore of the stimulus money to the college, essentially saying “that’s all you guys get,” according to Sullivan.

The Web site www.recovery.gov was set up by the Obama administration so the public could track where the stimulus money is going. According to the site, City College has received five “awards”, totaling $2,744,426. Sullivan said this number is inaccurate.

“I don’t know what this is,” Sullivan said. “I can tell you unequivocally there’s no way we’ve gotten $2,274,000 in federal support. I have no idea what this is.”

The Web site describes four of the awards as grant programs, and one as campus-based/Federal Work Study.

Sullivan later said by phone that the awards listed on the site are federal financial aid and work study program grants that the college has already received money for.

It’s unclear as to why the Web site lists these as money received from the stimulus package.

By comparison, City College has received more funding than other community colleges in the area.

The Web site reports that the Ventura County Community College District received $116,892.

However, the Web site also reports that Allan Hancock Community College in Santa Maria has received $1,914,482.

Sullivan said that, while the stimulus money helped improve the budget situation for this fiscal year, it’s the next fiscal year that’s really in trouble.

“We could use [the stimulus] funds over three years, but they didn’t give us enough,” Sullivan said.

He added that if the school had been given the original $1.2 million, the programs that received the money would’ve been in better shape for the upcoming years.

The $303,964 that the college received from the stimulus package was used to offset state budget cuts that happened earlier this year. Suffering programs such as the Extended Opportunity Programs and Services for low-income students and DSPS were able to receive significant amounts of the package money.

As The Channels reported back in September, DSPS has dealt with a $347,032 reduction in state funding compared to last year. The program will now receive $80,635 in stimulus money.

“Every dollar helps,” Janet Shapiro, Director of DSPS, said. “We were pleased to get eighty thousand. We would like more and we would like federal backfill to continue into the future because the state has cut DSPS, the categorical, by over 50 percent.”

Shapiro urged students and the community to encourage legislators to send more funding to programs like DSPS.