BARRY MILLS, who is slated to take the reins as interim chancellor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, painted a dire picture of finances and operations at the campus, saying the budget process is broken and that tough choices lie ahead for the school.

Mills spoke at meeting of the UMass board of trustees where outgoing chancellor Keith Motley delivered a passionate address, defending his 10 years on the job, but publicly evincing no bitterness about his impending departure.

UMass president Martin Meehan announced last week that Motely, whose contract expired in January, would step down at the end of the current school year. The campus has been roiled by a budget deficit of roughly $30 million that officials say is a result of an ambitious expansion and construction agenda that has not been accompanied by expected enrollment growth.

The departure of Motley, who is black and a popular figure on campus and in Boston’s minority community, has drawn sharp criticism from black leaders who charge that he is being scapegoated for problems that are also responsibility of university trustees and Meehan, who oversees the entire UMass system.

Meehan appeared to respond to those charges at Tuesday’s trustees meeting at the university’s main administrative offices in downtown Boston.

“The board’s role in particular has been unfairly characterized,” he said. Meehan said while the trustees have broad authority over the university, “responsibility for campus-level budget decisions is with the five chancellors.”

Motley, who previously served as an administrator at Northeastern University, said lots of people warned him about the uncertain condition of UMass Boston when he decided to move to the campus. “They told me I was going to the Titanic,” he said, standing before the trustees and a packed room of observers.

But Motley said he has never looked back and has no regrets about tenure at UMass, which serves a racially diverse student body that also includes older students heading to college for the first time in their 20s or 30s.

“What more could I ask for than the opportunity to serve,” he said. Motley said he has had a good working relationship with Mills and would “pass the baton” and look for the campus to thrive under his successor. The two even shared a hug following the meeting.

He said UMass Boston is “an institution that gets into your soul” and called the current problems a “pebble in the road for us.”

But the financial problems facing the school are much bigger than a pebble.

Robert Manning, chairman of the trustees, said the problems are “going to require some incredibly difficult decisions” that will stretch out over several years.

Meehan said the Boston campus had approval from the board of trustees to operate with “negative operating margins” for three straight budget years – in fiscal 2014, 2015, and 2016. He said planned deficits can be appropriate for short periods.

He said the actual deficit for 2016, however, wound up being roughly double what had been approved — $5.3 million versus $2.7 million.

By January of this year, he said, the projected deficit had reached $15 million. At that point, Meehan said, he stepped in to campus operations to try to help figure out ways to ease the deficit, an audit by the accounting firm KPMG was ordered, and the university reached out to Mills, the retired president of Bowdoin College, to gauge his willingness to consider coming on board to aid Motley in campus operations.

Mills was hired last month at a salary of $250,000 to serve as deputy chancellor and chief operating officer under Motley with a focus on stabilizing the school’s finances and operations. With Motley’s announced departure, he will take over as interim chancellor, but said he will not be a candidate for the permanent post.

Mills offered strong praise for the quality of many programs and the strength of the faculty, but had blunt words about the school’s finances in his remarks to the board.

“Every day there’s a new problem that has a lot of zeros,” he said.

He said an ambitious campus construction agenda was predicated on the belief that enrollment growth and a big boost in philanthropic support would follow. “That strategy hasn’t proved out,” said Mills.

University officials announced earlier on Tuesday that they made more than $20 million in budget fixes for the current year, leaving a deficit of $6 to $7 million.

But Mills made it clear that the school faces a far larger budget hole going forward. “The systemic problem is somewhere in the range of $30 million,” he said. “This is not a one-year turnaround.”

Mills said the campus would have to do better on the “revenue line,” with enrollment growth and development of online offerings – which he said UMass Boston was lagging behind on.  He also said the campus mission of providing access to student populations not always well-served by higher education make it “ripe” for tapping philanthropic enterprises that target that issue.

To get the campus on track, he said, he would have to make very “hard choices,” and that would begin with ordering a thorough evaluation of every program. He said some would be found to be financially unsustainable or not academically worthy of being maintained.

He did not mince words in describing a campus that has suffered from poor management. “I can save KPMG a lot of time,” he said of the auditing firm that has been retained to evaluate the school. The budget process “at this institution is fundamentally broken,” he said, citing both a lack of transparency and the fact the school’s deans don’t feel they have control over their own budgets and therefore aren’t accountable for results.