Western Kentucky University officials are waiting for details to emerge about a proposed state budget that could determine the fate of many projects and tuition rates at the university.

A House committee’s budget slated for a vote Tuesday reportedly doesn’t include a 12 percent cut for higher education that had previously been discussed.

“I’m encouraged and cautiously optimistic that the House budget will do two things,” WKU President Gary Ransdell said. “(First) get us back to zero, meaning no further cuts, and secondly restore the vetoed projects and fund a couple of capital projects beyond that.

“We have a lot at stake with what’s unfolding in Frankfort right now.”

State colleges and universities had to cut 3 percent from their current budgets earlier this year because of a state budget shortfall. The cut was about $2.5 million for WKU.

Ransdell said the university will now turn its attention to the next fiscal year’s budget, and determine a tuition rate increase, likely to be between 7 percent and 9 percent depending on the state budget funding levels.

But the tuition increase will not be used to offset budget cuts directly.

Ransdell said it is important that revenue generated by tuition be used for fixed-cost increases, a compensation package for faculty and staff and funding some of the university’s strategic plan priorities, such as increasing academic and merit-based scholarships.

“If you simply raise tuition and use that money to offset budget cuts, you gain nothing,” he said. “We will use it to make some level of progress.”

Ransdell also said the university needs to stay competitive with other state institutions when it comes to tuition.

The university’s strategic plan that was introduced last fall had a range of priorities that “we planned to fund more aggressively had we received an increase in state appropriation,” Ransdell said, including expanding study abroad opportunities and regional campuses. He said it is unlikely the WKU campus in Elizabethtown will get a hoped-for new building this budget cycle. Instead, the university is seeking planning and design money for the building, and will come back to the state in 2010 and ask for construction money, he said.

Ransdell said he’s also hoping projects approved by the General Assembly in 2006 and vetoed by former Gov. Ernie Fletcher will be restored in the new budget.

The projects include new labs, planning and design money for a new college of business and expansions of Van Meter Auditorium and the Ivan Wilson Center for Fine Arts.

Most of the three percent cut - about $1.8 million - was made in the university’s general expenses, utilities savings and a percentage of the university’s divisions’ overall budgets.