The Student Association assembly passed two major bills concerning budget issues Monday night.

The bills, designed to reduce the amount of money carried over from the student fee fund at the end of each fiscal year, deadlocked over how funds should be distributed among student groups and SA.

The first bill passed allows student organizations to keep all revenue earned from fundraising activities instead of returning half of it back to the student fee fund.

‘Half of the money just sits there and doesn’t benefit anyone,’ said Maggie Misztal, SA comptroller and author of the bill.

Almost $250,000 in funds are left over from last year, 70 percent of which are from revenues raised by student organizations. Misztal said she hopes the bill will give groups a chance to put the money to good use by benefiting the students.

The second bill proposed by Misztal proposed that any funds that carry over from the last fiscal year will be distributed back to student organizations with 25 percent dedicated to contingency funds and 75 percent to special programming funds.

Before the second bill was passed the SA assembly and other students attending the meeting engaged in a heated debate over the issue for over an hour.

Misztal said the debate was due to the fact that members of SA wanted a cut of the $250,000 carryover money.

‘Certain representatives within the organization felt that there should be a 10 percent set aside for Student Association initiatives,’ Misztal said. ‘We basically had a hard time cutting a check to the Student Association.’

During the debate over the bill, Travis Mason expressed his concern that SA would not have the funds to implement its initiatives. But Misztal said SA could still request funds from the 75 percent of the carryover money that is dedicated to special programming.

‘It looks like greed to me on the side of the association because I really couldn’t justify where they were coming from, ‘ Misztal said.

SA president Andrew Lederman and Mason met with the finance board to discuss the bill, but Misztal said the finance board did not think it was right for them to give SA a portion of the carryover money without the same chance as all other organizations on campus.

Mason said he and Lederman went to the finance board meeting to make sure that they made an informed decision. He praised the board for looking at the problem and working in the best interest of the students.

‘I really didn’t see anything wrong with the bill,’ Mason said. ‘I’m just concerned we all make uninformed decisions.’

In other SA news:

n In his Vice Presidential Report, Mason said the Goldstein Dining Center on South Campus will remain open until midnight each night for the first three weeks in November. If the Goldstein administrators see that the number of students at Goldstein during these hours are up then the hours will remain permanent. During this trial period campus delivery will remain active an extra hour each night until 2 a.m.

n At the Board of Trustees meeting last week Lederman and Mason spoke with the board about starting an Asian American studies group and keeping the computer cluster on South Campus open 24 hours, just like the clusters on North Campus.

Published on October 4, 2004 at 12:00 pm