Student Congress makes tough cuts to balance yearly budget

The Student Congress Finance Committee struggled to balance its annual budget after 72 groups on campus requested financial assistance.

“We had a lot more groups apply in the sense that there were a few more groups than usual,” said Josh Aristy, finance committee chairman. “There were a lot more high value requests, so we had to do more cuts than usual because so much money was requested.”

The committee was allotted $180,527 to help student groups, but there was more than $423,000 in requests, Aristy said.

“When you talk about $180,000, that’s not a little amount of money, but once you add up all the need amongst the groups, it makes (balancing) difficult,” Treasurer Brittany Best said. “I think everyone on the committee worked really hard to maximize the support that we gave to these groups.”

Best has been involved with the finance committee for four years and has helped balance four annual budgets. She said the amount of money student government allocates has remained generally the same, but the amount of need has increased.

“More and more departments are unable to support student groups, so that leads them to have more need,” she said. “We’ve also seen an explosion of the number of groups. There are new groups every year, and that means there’s more need every year.”

Austin McCall, the treasurer of the Sexuality and Gender Alliance, experienced a $500 cut to his original request of $2,510. The money would help fund the group’s biannual magazine and a drag event.

“I think the cuts they made were totally justifiable,” McCall said. “I expected to be asked more questions and have every single number dissected, but the committee was pretty thorough and knew what they were doing.”

Groups can appeal the cuts made on Tuesday before the committee sends their proposals to Student Congress.

“The appeals likely won’t succeed — I don’t see any of them succeeding,” Aristy said. “It’s really hard because that’s just the money we have. We have to justify taking it from somewhere else, which is difficult because we’re viewpoint neutral, so we can’t just say, ‘this group is better than this group.’”

Aristy said his team did well during a weekend of relentless budgeting.

“I think we stayed true to our mission of neutrality and trying to help the students,” he said. “I think any cuts we have made have been done equally across the board. We really do try to think of the impact that’s being made.”

university@dailytarheel.com