At Tuesday’s SGA meeting the new budget for clubs and organizations was presented and then voted on. The budget committee worked on the budget for three weeks, meeting first with clubs and then going through proposed budgets, deciding what was necessary and what the committee saw as extraneous or unnecessary and made the necessary budget cuts.
The vote on the budget was called to question rather quickly, after some debate from the Empty Bowls project and the ISC.
Cuts were made to nearly every budget, with the budget committee stipulating that they can’t fund clubs whose activities aren’t open to the entire campus or on individual club member’s dues.
The ISC goes to a conference at Yale every year, which is extremely expensive so the budget committee can only allot limited funds because that conference is not open to all students. Other trips include twelve trips to New York, which cannot be totally paid for by the SGA because they are dealing with a limited budget.
The Empty Bowls project requested $4,700 and was allotted $1,075, mainly because much of their budget was being used for advertisement, some of which can be done for free through WAC Haps and the SGA office also will allow use of their materials to make fliers. Projects that Empty Bowls were initiating, such as the painting of bowls for fundraising purposes were fully funded.
Jen Daley, Vice President of Financial affairs stressed that the budget committee went through every single budget in order to be fair and reminded clubs that part of the funds for the budget come from the student body, each student contributes $65.55 to the fund and that money needs to be stretched out so that all students and clubs are treated fairly.
The discretionary fund was allotted $1,755 and now the discretionary fund now stands at $5,566. The discretionary fund is there in case clubs need more money and in case of debt from Birthday Ball. This is one of the few years that the SGA has a discretionary fund as is not in debt.
Other events at the SGA meeting included swearing in Ambika Vishwanath, the new dorm senator for Minta Martin.
It was also brought up that many of the recycling bins are now missing. Apparently maintenance stored them for winter break and now they cannot be found.
Kent County can only issue a limited amount of recycling bins so the bins that we had must be found. No one is really sure where the recycling bins are but President Darrin Brozene promised to check into that and see if the recycling can be found.