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| SGA members at Monday's meeting (photo by Victoria Abad) |
The SGA voted to cut funding for most University Sponsored Organizations (USOs) and other campus organizations at their last meeting of the semester Monday night. The cut was due to a $20,000 deficit SGA was facing as a result of the funding requests for the 2018-2019 school year.
The meeting, which Senator Emeritus Samy Abdallah, a senior, described as “the biggest budgeting meeting ever,” lasted more than three hours and went through several waves of heated debates.
One of them dealt with whether the Trinitonian would receive a $10,000 grant, which they received last year, for Registered Student Organizations (RSOs), such as various cultural groups on campus, to advertise in the paper. RSOs get funded by SGA on a case-by-case basis.
Senator Emeritus and senior Shivani Parmar said during the debate that she preferred giving the $10,000 to various RSOs to be used toward advertising in the Trinitonian.
Abdallah, on the other hand, simply did not see it necessary to pay Trinitonian the money for advertising. Instead, he supported allocating the money to RSOs to fund their events in the upcoming year. “I personally don’t think that on-campus events are primarily advertised through the Trinitonian,” he said after the meeting.
The senators voted to not give the $10,000 to the Trinitonian, and cut the Mirage’s budget by 9%.
Class of 2019 Senator, Daniela Montúfar, said after the meeting that the Trinitonian’s expenses were justified, but she voted no for the advertisement grant. “I think that RSO’s should be able to choose the PR technique that best fits their event and request funds from SGA accordingly," she said.
Another heated debate involved funding for the Student Programming Board (SPB), in particular, their request to fund two concerts, one in the fall, and the other in the spring. SPB was asking for roughly $48,000 to fund the spring concert.
“Students don’t want a second concert. They want a really good fall concert,” said Montúfar, although SPB representatives insisted that students did want more concerts.
During the debate, some senators suggested having student performers or inviting alumni and local artists, rather than hiring professional artists from other cities, in order to save money. Eventually, the SGA voted to scrap the spring concert all together.
This brought the proposed funding for SPB from $216,000 to roughly $168,000, which was about $10,000 less than the funding they received in previous years. There was a motion of giving SPB that $10,000 back, bringing their total budget to around $174,000. The SGA voted in favor of this motion.
Funding for the Greek Council generated yet another lengthy debate Monday night. Last year, the SGA decided to cut funding completely for Greek Council, which triggered a protest from Trinity’s Greek life.
“I think the reason the Greek Council debate went on for so long honestly has to do with the limited amount of funds available,” said SGA Secretary, sophomore Taylor Volzer, adding that the senate does not want to necessarily cut funding for certain parties when there is no funding shortage. “While there has been controversy surrounding the funding of Greek Council in the past, I feel that this administration has taken steps to ensure that this budget gets looked at like any others,” she said.
The focus of this round of debate was whether or not to approve the $6,000 requested, including $4,000 to invite guest speakers for Greek life.
Abdallah, the senator emeritus and a member of the Omega Phi fraternity, said that “I believe that the speakers have not been especially beneficial to my experience.” Other SGA members of Greek life echoed this opinion.
After a lengthy back-and-forth, SGA voted to give the Greek Council $2,000 for inviting guest speakers.
“Personally, I don’t feel as if the speakers have had a large impact on my experience in Greek life, so I feel that this is a fairly justified decision,” said Emily Bae, a sophomore and member of the Sigma Theta Tau sorority.
Last year, SGA funded around $130,000 for RSOs. The goal was to fund about the same amount for the 2018-2019 school year. The SGA meeting reviews and votes on funding requests of $5,000 and above. At the end of Monday's meeting, SGA reached an budget of around $569,000 for USOs and $109,000 for RSOs.
“Next year will be tight,” said SGA Vice President Rachel Daniel as the meeting concluded. “Last year we were very liberal with budget proposals and this year we were very conservative.”
“They are going to have to make wise decisions, because there just isn’t enough money to sustain all the events that RSO’s have every single year,” said Abdallah.
The SGA will make available the final budget regarding USOs on Friday, April 27th.
Corrections: The story has been updated to reflect the following corrections. We apologize for the errors:
- There were no SPB representatives at Monday's meeting. Some suggestions regarding the concerts were made by the senators.
- The motion for giving the $10,000 back to SPB was passed by SGA, rather than put off for later discussion.
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