Daily Egyptian Politics Editor

Undergraduate Student Government needs to change the way its Finance Committee handles funding of Registered Student Organizations, and a new resolution may create better guidelines, some members say.

Joyce Newby, chairwoman of the Finance Committe, has written an amendment to USG’s constitution that seeks to create consistent funding procedures for the committee.

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In the current constitution, the Finance Committee is governed by four vague guidelines, and Newby said this has created problems in the past. Her amendment, she said, may prevent RSO funding problems in the future.

The reason I did this is I felt that right now the Finance Committee is open to do whatever it wants to concerning funding, she said. We don’t want to have a repeat of the problem we had last year, which carried over into this year.

Last year, the Finance Committee overestimated the amount of funding it could allocate to RSOs, which temporarily left USG without money to fund groups last fall. After the fall budget was refigured, USG ended up with a small positive balance in its general funding account, which is used to fund spontaneous special events for RSOs.

Newby, though, does not want future Finance Committees to feel a money crunch as a result of overspending. The first part of that goal was to fund RSOs less money in USG’s annual RSO fee allocation process.

Now, Newby plans to introduce the constitutional amendment Wednesday at the Student Senate meeting. The provisions are somewhat stringent, Newby said, which should prevent the Finance Committee from recommending too much funding to organizations.

For example, USG will no longer pay for items such as food and beverages or computers for RSOs. If an RSO needs these items, she said, it can pay for them with membership dues or fund raisers. Newby said one group requesting funding was dismayed this year when funding for a dinner was denied.

We had one group who asked us to fund them for a $7,000 banquet, she said. We can’t be funding banquets for groups.

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The fee allocation forms contain information stating that if a group is allocated money for an event, and it later uses the money instead to pay for an item USG will not fund, the group will be subject to an investigation by USG’s Internal Affairs Committee. If the Internal Affairs Committee determines that money was improperly spent, the Finance Committee will not fund the RSO again. In addition, Student Development could use misspending to remove a group’s RSO status.

General funding requests made throughout the year also will be limited to a maximum of $250 dollars, which tightens loopholes in the current general funding process.

We have had a lot of groups apply for general funding simply because they don’t want to got through the entire funding process, she said. In the past years, we had some groups who got as much money from filling out a two or three page form as opposed to the 10- or 15-page annual funding form.

In addition, Newby’s amendment provides a time period for the release of fee allocation forms. Before, the forms were available on a hit-or-miss basis each year. The amendment recommends the forms be made available by the fourth week of the spring semester.

USG President Dave Vingren said he thinks both the senate and RSOs will be content with the amendment.

In the past, presidents and sponsors of RSOs would recommend to us that some consistent funding process be developed and used year to year, he said. This is something that RSOs can depend on and look at it year after year when they do their budgets. It will keep the funding process from becoming a guessing game.