Gov. Bobby Jindal will submit his tightened executive budget today — quite fittingly on Friday the 13th — and higher education is expected to get hit hard. During a meeting at the Governor’s Mansion on March 6, state college leaders were told to expect a funding reduction of at least $219 million, or 8 percent. And according to documents released Tuesday by the LSU System, the University will face a $45.1 million cut. “It will be like the Flagship Agenda never happened,” Chancellor Michael Martin said in a University news release Tuesday. “The cut will likely cause us to fall back to where we were eight or 10 years ago. This kind of cut — 20 percent — would be a major setback for LSU.”Jindal is expected to propose a $219 million budget cut in higher education state funding for the fiscal year beginning July 1 — meaning a $34.8 million cut for the University. The total cut of $45.1 million includes the now permanent $10.3 million mid-year budget cut for fiscal year 2008-09. “We will do all we can to minimize the adverse impacts, but this will clearly do real harm to a great university,” Martin said in the release. LSU broke into the top tier of U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” list in August, an accomplishment that makes the possibility of large budget cuts even more painful, Martin said. He said the ranking is a result of the Flagship Agenda — a plan to make the University nationally competitive by 2010 — and the Legislature funding the University at the Southern Regional Education Board average during the past two years. Martin said in the release he wants to see the University rewarded for its high levels of performance. Jindal announced at a news conference Wednesday afternoon his plans to use about $100 million of state surplus funds to invest in capital outlay projects for higher education. The 21 infrastructure projects receiving surplus funds include about $5 million for the University’s new band hall and a chiller at LSU South Campus, $12.2 million for LSU at Eunice to construct a building with technology laboratories and lecture halls and $11 million dollars for the new clinical research facility at Pennington Biomedical Research Center.While surplus funds cannot be used to supplement the possibly hefty budget cuts, investment in capital outlay projects will keep the state moving forward, Jindal said at the news conference. “We’re going to have to do more with less, set priorities and make sure that even while we’re tightening our belt, that we are moving forward,” Jindal said.——Contact Kyle Bove at [email protected]