In the midst of an ongoing budget crisis and an effort to reshape and refocus the seven-campus University of Maine System, the system’s board of trustees will get its first look Monday at a proposal to combine some graduate programs and house them in a new Portland-based graduate center.

UMS Chancellor James Page said a Boston-based consulting firm that has been working on the proposed “Alfond Professional and Graduate Center” found that such a center “is indeed a transformative concept” for the system. The programs are now on different campuses.

“Based on the business/legal community’s enthusiastic endorsement of the core concept, bringing graduate business and legal education under one roof could catalyze the growth of small to medium businesses across Maine,” Page wrote in a memo to the trustees. Additional details about the plan were not available Friday, according to a system spokesman.

Page said in the memo that he is already seeking private funding for the next stage, which includes hiring someone to head up the planning development process, work with private industry and “test the core concepts with targeted pilot offerings.”

The Parthenon Group of Boston, hired in February with $500,000 from the Harold Alfond Foundation to explore the concept, will make its first public presentation at the trustees’ meeting at the University of Southern Maine campus in Portland.

The initial proposal envisions a program involving faculty members from the two business schools – at University of Maine in Orono and USM – and the University of Maine School of Law, which is housed on the USM campus.

A small group of people from the three programs has been working with The Parthenon Group on the proposal. They have discussed how instructors at Orono would teach at a Portland-based center, as well as other issues, among them determining where tuition dollars would go and whether a degree from the graduate center would be considered a system degree or be affiliated with USM or Orono. In June, the 26 full-time faculty members in USM’s business school issued a joint statement raising some of these issues, concerned that it would be located in Portland but run as an Orono program.

The law school – which already has joint degree programs with the business schools and the Muskie School of Public Service at USM – has long sought better facilities. Law school Dean Peter Pitegoff has said the current building, a distinct round structure built in 1972 on USM’s Portland campus, lacks adequate lounge, study and classroom space and access to technology that students expect. A new facility could offer up-to-date technology and have adequate space for classrooms, public events and work with clients.

In other business, the trustees will also get updated financial information and sign off on a new federally required update to the sexual assault/harassment policies at all campuses.

The Alfond Foundation, named for the late Maine businessman and philanthropist Harold Alfond, is a longtime donor to educational causes in the state, from funding multimillion-dollar facilities to providing $500 college grants to all babies born in Maine.