The board’s 9 a.m. informal session, which is not open to the public, ran for more than two and a half hours, cutting into its committee meetings that were supposed to begin at 10:30 a.m.

At least a dozen students, faculty and staff members waited for more than an hour outside the doors of the President’s Conference Room inside the Bovee University Center for those meetings to start.

When doors finally did open to the public at about 11:30 a.m., the board quickly ran through agenda items for its scheduled committee meetings and cut to lunch within 15 minutes.

Foster said anyone criticizing the board’s seemingly behind-closed-doors policy does make a valid point, but “there’s never any decisions made behind closed doors,” she said.

Foster said the board had a lot to talk about at the informal session, which is why it took so long. It also included a lengthy presentation from Trustee Jeff Caponigro, she said.

“Then, there was a lot of questions concerning the budget and a lot of budget-related issues,” Foster said.

Board chairman James Fabiano said the extended closed doors informal session allowed trustees to be better informed by senior administrators on budgetary issues surrounding the university.

“That’s our educational session,” Fabiano said.

However, by the time it opened doors to the public, the board already had passed through the Academic and Student Affairs Committee agenda items, leaving some people out of the loop.

“I wasn’t paying attention and I’m not on that committee,” Foster said, defending the hasty actions.

Because Trustee Stephanie Comai was absent, the committee that she chairs, the Policy and Bylaws Committee, did not meet and four proposals to be acted on were not included in the 1 p.m. formal session.

The board will not meet again until July 8. In the meeting, decisions are expected to come from the board regarding tuition rates, the proposed athletics fee and the women’s field hockey team’s lack of a playing surface for next fall.

North Carolina senior Rob Harrison addressed the board about gender equity issues that could leave the university in violation of Title IX if a solution is not reached soon regarding the field-less field hockey team.

“When we replace (the field), make sure that we can be proud of it,” Harrison told the board.

He said the board should utilize the campus improvement fee, instead of general fund dollars to avoid appearing that they are cutting jobs in effort to fund athletics.

“You can avoid that bomb by simply using the funds set aside for this type of project,” Harrison said.

Members of the Student Government Association and Residence Hall Assembly submitted a list of 10 recommendations to the board for the fee’s usage. Using the fee toward a new field was not on the list.

University President Michael Rao said in an April 13 interview that he did not find it necessary to dip into the campus improvement fee savings to fund the field hockey project. Athletics Director Herb Deromedi has estimated a new field hockey facility to cost as much as $800,000.

Caponigro said, amid the $7.3 million budget shortfall, it’s best to wait for the state’s final appropriation decisions before announcing job eliminations and decisions regarding tuition and athletics.

“It’s premature to speculate at this point,” Caponigro said. “There’s no use trying to get too far ahead of the process.”