Finance committee plans a more fair way to allocate funds

Student Congress’s finance committee members met Tuesday to discuss a new way to allocate funds.

They talked about switching to what finance committee chairperson Ben Albert calls a fairer way to allocate money to student groups for later appropriations.

The finance committee might abandon the first come, first served system for allocating money to student groups. Albert said they would look at the total number of requests and divide it by the total number of meetings.

Christopher Canter, a finance committee member, said the plan is to streamline the process for subsequent appropriations. He said one of the biggest problems is that the committee isn’t able to hear funding requests from every student group requesting funds.

“Currently what we do is we arbitrarily decide how much each group should get,” Canter said. “We’ll hear every group’s pitch on why they should get X amount of dollars, and we say we’ll talk amongst ourselves and think how much they should really get.”

Ethics chairperson Katharine Shriver said the finance committee allocated their $170,000 for the fall semester’s subsequent appropriations on a first come, first served basis.

“The problem is whoever clicks the button first gets to the money when the budget is completely full, and whoever gets to it last, there might be $1,000 left as opposed to like $140,000,” Shriver said.

Albert said the committee has already granted all of the money they have for this semester, and the committee was only able to grant money to 60 of the 200 organizations that requested money.

“We just ran out of money because each request comes before us and then we evaluate it on a request by request basis without really keeping an eye on the total amount of money that we have and so we just ended up giving out more money to fewer groups rather than just spreading it out more evenly,” Albert said.

He said the committee only heard groups that requested money within five minutes of the request portal opening.

Two of the three meetings scheduled to happen on Tuesday were cancelled.

Student Congress Speaker Cole Simons said the Rules and Judiciary Committee’s meeting was canceled Tuesday because the bill that was going to be discussed was a violation of the student constitution, which Student Congress does not have jurisdiction over.

He said the bill sought to lower the passing threshold on student referendums from two-thirds to 50 percent plus one in time for Friday’s referendum.

To pass the bill, a referendum will have to be voted on by the student body.

Friday’s election will include a referendum on whether to separate the Graduate and Professional Student Federation from student government. In spring 2016, the vote for separation received 50.2 percent of the vote — a majority, but not enough to pass.

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