 Many colleges throughout the state are facing budget shortages. Central Lakes College in Brainerd is committed to looking toward the future to address those challenges. Our Logan Gaye has more. Central Lakes College is taking a long-term approach to position the college for the future. This year we have a fairly small budget shortfall but we decided to look over the next two years to really predict where we were going to be and that's again based on enrollment declines. We're about 2.2 million for the next two years. The nationwide budget shortfall comes from declining enrollment. Systemwide enrollment across Minnesota State is down and it changes from day to day but across the state it's down by about 3.5 percent right now we're about there 3.7 or so percent but we're heading the right direction. To address the challenges CLC decided to focus on two critical strategies. One is to make sure that we continue our ability to serve students and the other one is that we preserve positions those were critical to us so we started out by offering an incentivized retirement program in hopes of doing something that's good for people as well as good for the college and we ended up with about 10 people retiring in that round between those retirements some additional retirements not filling vacant positions we found significant savings. CLC president Harry Charlier knows how tough these decisions can be. Every one of those individuals does a fabulous job and it's really hard to lose anybody. The challenges may have affected the entire college but not the programs. All core services have been preserved the vast majority of programs have been preserved so they should see no difference if we do our job well making sure we're doing things smarter and differently with fewer fewer employees. The college is excited for their future and brainered Logan Gaye Lakeland News. CLC officials have also made a priority to meet with students and ask them for their input on the enrollment issue. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.