11/26/2024
Over the last several months, COR²E has spent considerable time finalizing FY2025 budgets and calculating new rates for service and analysis across our core facilities. These rates were intended to go into effect at the beginning of FY2025 but were delayed and will now go into effect on January 1, 2025. COR²E’s budgeting exercises are extensive and allow us to estimate annual costs and adjust our hourly usage rates accordingly. The last time our rates were adjusted was the beginning of FY2023. As we are all acutely aware, prices for reagents and service have risen considerably since July 2022. Although internal usage of COR²E facilities is and will continue to be heavily subsidized by the OVPR, adjusting for rising costs is necessary to help recover annual expenses.
For FY2025, we’ve adjusted our rate calculation to allow our users to “pay their fair share” of the expenses incurred each year. Traditionally, we’ve estimated the total anticipated usage per instrument or service to calculate usage rates for the following year. However, for FY2025 we are implementing a change to this calculation and have instead used the reasonable total available usage per instrument or service to calculate new rates. This allows facility users to pay an amount proportional to their individual and actual usage for equipment and services instead of a greater share for services that were not heavily utilized. Since the total available usage time is commonly larger than the amount of anticipated usage for each service and/or instrument, user-operated hourly rates have decreased in most cases. For instruments that were already very heavily used, there will be less of an effect on FY2025 rates. For instruments that have required substantially increased service- or repair-related costs compared to years prior, FY2025 rates have increased to help recover a portion of these rising costs.
In the past, some training opportunities, assisted experiments, and/or provided services that require direct COR²E personnel support were billed at substantially lower rates than the dedicated personnel time truly cost the University. In FY2025, COR²E is making a conscious effort to recover a higher amount of direct personnel time spent supporting research. Across our core facilities, this necessitated an increase in the assisted rate for service or analysis. Again, facility users will pay their “fair share” of utilized personnel time. Ultimately, we anticipate that most users of COR²E facilities will not observe a large influence on the total amount spent using our resources due to these changes: the net change in rates is likely to be small since unassisted usage rates have generally decreased and personnel-related usage rates have generally increased.
If you have facility-specific questions regarding the new rate determination process or inquiries about specific rate changes, please contact the appropriate Facility Director. For additional questions or concerns, feel free to contact me at the below address.
Jeremy L. Balsbaugh, Ph.D. (Jeremy.Balsbaugh@uconn.edu)
Director, Center for Open Research Resources & Equipment (COR²E)
Director, UConn Proteomics & Metabolomics Facility (PMF)
