Budget cuts haven’t prevented U. California-Berkeley administrators from drinking excessively-bottled water, that is. An article in The New York Times last week revealed that the U. California has spent roughly $2 million on brand-name water that has been distributed to the Berkeley and San Francisco campuses in recent years. UC Berkeley paid Arrowhead more than half a million dollars for bottled water in three fiscal years starting in 2006.

In a time when academic programs are being cut and faculty members face furloughs, spending scarce funds on bottled water is frivolous. Not to mention environmentally harmful. We expect the administration to make the right decision and end its contract with Arrowhead-the Bay Area does have pristine tap water, after all.

But bottled water may just be the tip of the iceberg in terms of the campus’s unnecessary expenses.

The freelance reporter who wrote the story for The New York Times has attested to the difficulty of tracking line-item spending for the average taxpayer or even students, staff and faculty. Though the university is good about making broad budget overviews publicly available, precise details of where the money actually goes can be extremely hard to find.

Clearly, despite its common references to transparency, the university still has a long way to go. And in a time when there isn’t much money to spare, concerns about expenses that seem small on the surface become that much more important. Small expenses really do add up.

Additionally, the revelation of this unwise expenditure calls into question the administration’s ability to make budget cuts in a logical and fair manner. It seems, in the case of bottled water, that they missed an area of significant potential savings that was right under their own noses.

And though the final report on the Operational Excellence initiative was released last week, line-item expenses like bottled water continue to fly largely under the radar. Making these line-item expenses visible and cutting the obviously unnecessary ones should be more of a priority.