EUREKA -- With just days left in the fiscal year and two months before fall semester begins, College of the Redwoods officials learned the state budget impasse may make it impossible to hold classes.

There may be no money coming in for salaries.

State Controller Steve Westly announced on Wednesday that if the budget is not passed, he will be unable to allocate around $200 million to the state's 108 community colleges in July. The payment is about 8 percent of the total annual funding for the colleges. Another $200 million will be at risk in August if the budget has not yet passed.

This means the roughly 1,000 CR employees may not get paid. Several CR administrators were in Sacramento on Wednesday to hear the bad news, and are now struggling to figure out what to do next.

The state Constitution requires the Legislature to pass the budget by July 1, but this hardly ever happens. Last year, the budget was adopted more than two months late.

In the past, state workers have been paid in the interim under the assumption that the budget, once adopted, would cover these costs. Westly said a recent state Supreme Court decision now prohibits him from allocating money to pay many state employees.

"There is no legal authority to pay community colleges without a budget, and they will receive no new state money until a budget is passed," he wrote in a letter to legislators.

That means College of the Redwoods will not receive money to pay its employees or its bills after July 1. Vice President for Academic Affairs Jeff Bobbitt said CR has been striving to cut expenditures to deal with state budget cuts. The college has saved some money in anticipation of future crises as the state budget drama unfolds, and Bobbitt said that money might be enough to get the college through July.

"But it would mean cashing in everything that we've been trying to hold in reserve as a hedge against next year," he said.

And it would mean that CR would be broke sometime in August.

The college has 350 full-time and around 650 part-time employees, a figure which includes faculty and staff throughout the Redwoods Community College District. CR has campuses in Crescent City and Fort Bragg as well as Eureka.

The summer session is already under way, and Bobbitt said the college is committed to doing whatever is necessary to making sure students already enrolled can complete it. But fall semester, which starts Aug. 25, is another matter.

The college has already cut many fall class sections to deal with an expected 5.6 percent cut to its budget. Bobbitt said it may have to cut more sections if the state budget impasse drags on, starting with those taught by part-time faculty. Depending on the length of the impasse, CR could have to suspend its fall semester classes altogether.

Bobbitt said shutting down in the fall is the worst-case scenario, but it's hard to know when to make that decision. Students are already registered for fall classes. Bobbitt said CR wants to warn them as early as possible that they may not be able to attend -- but also wants to give the Legislature as much time as possible to come up with a plan.

"If we shut the whole thing down in the fall there'd be about seven to eight thousand students who'd expect to be here," he said. "The potential negative impact on the community is enormous."

Community Colleges Chancellor Thomas J. Nussbaum said in a press release that nearly all the state's community colleges will be suffering such dilemmas within months. The California community college system enrolls more than 2 million students.

"We're all trying to hold the good thought that wisdom and sanity will prevail" and the state will get past the impasse, Bobbitt said. "But there's a whole lot of people in Humboldt County who will be directly affected if this plays out."

Westly wrote to legislators that most state employees will only be paid minimum wage, and elected officials and their staffs will not be paid at all until the budget is passed. Students receiving financial aid also won't get money from the state without a budget.

"An on-time budget can solve all of these problems. ... I hope this information will help you to move toward a compromise budget solution," Westly's letter concluded.