UK plans on weathering a 2 percent drop in the university budget this fiscal year by absorbing the cuts centrally, President Lee Todd announced in a campuswide e-mail Thursday night.

Operating unit budgets, such as those of individual colleges, will not be cut.

Earlier this year, the state approved the 2 percent higher education cut, meaning a $6.3 million drop in funding.

That comes at the same time UK expects a $16 million increase for the next year in fixed costs such as utilities, student financial aid and operating expenses.

UK spokesman Jimmy Stanton did not have details on what specifically would be cut centrally Thursday night.

In his e-mail, Todd said the university will cover the entire increase in health benefit premiums for employees and UK will freeze parking fees for 2009-10. Salaries will not go up. Todd said UK is “taking these steps to try to keep people’s pay from going backwards.”

Layoffs are not on the table right now, Stanton said.

In-state undergraduate tuition will increase by 5 percent over the next school year, which Todd said would partially offset the university’s tightening budget. He expects some help from the federal stimulus package passed by Congress, but the amount of stimulus dollars expected to reach UK over the next two years isn’t known yet.

The university anticipates the 2 percent cuts will be permanent and the funding won’t come back in the next fiscal year, Todd said.

Gov. Steve Beshear will receive an estimate about the state’s budget deficit for 2009-10 sometime in the next few months, which is expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

“There are only so many ways to solve that problem, and most of them include further reductions in state support for postsecondary education,” Todd said. “So there is a good chance we have not seen the last of budget cuts.”