UA's Hart gets pay raise, merit bonus

University of Arizona President Ann Weaver Hart is worth every cent of her new $665,500 pay package, her bosses said Friday in giving her a raise, boosting her housing allowance and approving a $115,000 merit bonus.

Members of the Arizona Board of Regents praised the performance of Hart and her fellow presidents, voting unanimously to award extra compensation to each of them in a time of tight finances.

“Personally, I think they’re way underpaid,” Regent Mark Killian of Mesa said of Hart, Arizona State University President Michael Crow and Northern Arizona University President Rita Cheng.

“We are fortunate to have these people. We don’t want to lose them,” Killian said during the regents meeting at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

“We’ve got a great leadership team,” Regent Greg Patterson of Scottsdale agreed as the board met for the vote.

Approval of the CEO pay hikes comes on the heels of a $99 million cut in state funding for the public university system. The loss of state funds has made the presidents’ jobs more challenging, regents said.

Hart was approved for a $25,000 raise to her $475,000 base pay and, in a last-minute change, also received a $20,000 boost to her $50,000 housing allowance.

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She’ll also receive $115,000 in merit pay for meeting some of her assigned performance goals, such as increasing UA’s freshman retention rate to 83.7 percent last year and increasing to 6,700 the number of bachelor’s degrees the UA awarded.

The new terms also include a one-year extension that will keep her at the UA until June 2018.

Crow of ASU was approved for a $150,000 merit bonus. He initially was to receive $160,000, but got less because one of his goals was miscalculated, the regents’ staff said.

NAU’s Cheng, on the job for about a year, will receive $40,000 in merit pay under a compensation system that ties part of each president’s pay to job performance.

Crow, who leads the state’s largest university, also was approved for a $30,000 increase to his base pay, bringing it from $570,000 to $600,000 — $100,000 more than Hart’s.

Cheng, hired last year to run Arizona’s smallest state school, will receive base pay of $390,000.