In addressing the University of Hawaii athletic department’s deficit situation, director Ben Jay struggled to find the appropriate comparison.

"It is like …well, what’s the (phrase) … squeezing the blood out of something … a turnip?" Jay said.

If the words don’t come easy these days, neither do the solutions.

The athletic department says it is approximately $2 million in the hole on budget projections and has until June 30, the end of the current fiscal year, to whittle the figure down to $1 million — or less — mandated by chancellor Tom Apple.

Jay said, "I just got the January (financial) report and, basically, I’m gonna craft out a memo (on cuts) right now to our staff. I haven’t come up with the details yet."

UH had a $3.3 million annual deficit last year and Apple wrote off a $14.7 million accumulated net deficit built up for the previous decade last summer. Apple has told athletics it must come within $1 million of its budget for each of the next three years on its "runway" to solvency.

Jay said he is currently wrestling with, "how much is essential services and how much is something that can be put off. My fear right now is there is not much more that we can cut. Our teams still have to travel, they still have to eat and, for the most part, between payroll expenses and scholarship expenses and recruiting, there isn’t much. And, I’m not gonna touch recruiting. It doesn’t leave a whole lot to be able to not spend."

Jay told the UH Board of Regents Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics last week, "Let me make one thing very clear, we don’t have a whole lot of fat. We are operating on a thin budget as it is. The fact of the matter is that we have no fat. We haven’t had any fat in years."

About 89 percent of the approximately $32 million annual budget is "locked in," officials said. The biggest portion of that, about 40 percent, is committed to salaries and benefits for UH staff and coaches, who have union agreements or contracts. Another 25 percent is tied up in scholarships.

Jay said, "One of the issues that we have is that when you are talking about cuts, we’re so thin to the bone, budget-wise, that a lot of that money is already spoken for."

Last week he held out the possibility that the department would curtail spending on materials and could cut the hours of part-time and temporary workers, but said, "our staffing (numbers) are below par and they are doing the work because we don’t have enough full-time people. So, how much (in) savings can you get anyway?"

Several of the 14 head coaches he is recommending for contract extensions are due raises. But Jay said they won’t come in this fiscal year. "We’ll have to fold them into future budgets," Jay said.

UH pays $1.2 million annually to subsidize opponents’ travel to Hawaii under the terms of its membership agreements with the Mountain West Conference in football and Big West in most other sports.

Jay said, "To me what all this proves is that this department has been chronically underfunded for a while."