Undergraduate Student Government’s Finance Committee members are taking a crash course in learning how not to handle students’ money a course last year’s committee chairman must have failed.

That failure is what is causing headaches for USG and Registered Student Organizations this school year. SIUC students should hope USG is taking notes and paying attention so that last year’s mistakes will not be repeated.

As the Oct. 17 deadline for RSOs to appeal for additional funding neared, Joyce Newby, USG Finance Committee Chairwoman, said that she wanted the appeals process to be as painless as possible for them.

Advertisement

Little did she know that only a few weeks later, she would report that more than 20 RSOs would have to wait until next semester for their funding because USG now has nothing left for them.

A number of RSOs will be looking to USG and more specifically, Newby for an explanation of the announcement made at last Wednesday’s USG meeting. These are groups that already had been shortchanged by last year’s USG Finance Committee one that gave them little or no funding. They were promised help from this year’s administration through the new funding appeals process, and now USG cannot make good on that promise until January.

USG President Dave Vingren said the fault lies with former USG Finance Committee Chairman Anthony Buie. At USG’s last meeting of spring 1997, Vingren said that Buie allocated about 97.5 percent of USG’s expected funds to RSOs. This was an excessive percentage of budgeted money to earmark, and it left USG with an uncomfortable margin of error to deal with in evaluating what it would be able to do this school year.

And afterward, money USG expected to receive before Buie’s allocations turned out to be less than the amount it had anticipated.

Jean Paratore, associate vice chancellor for Student Affairs, said that last November, budgeting showed $50,000 from the Student Organization Allocation Fund would be available to USG for use during the spring 1997 semester.

The SOAF is funded by the Student Activity Fee. As the exact amount of that money is unknown until students pay tuition and fees, the amount is projected so administrations like USG can produce budgets. But after money was collected from the Student Activity Fee, only $40,000 from the SOAF was transferred to USG’s account a substantial $10,000 less than originally budgeted.

Buie overbudgeted last year, and a resulting snowball effect is hampering a current USG administration that has been doing all it can to help students. Vingren and Newby may have to work double time to get things straightened out, but they can learn from the USG mistake in the past.

Advertisement*

Fiscal responsibility is paramount when an administration has thousands of dollars to handle and 21,908 students to whom they must answer. It is up to USG members to make informed and researched decisions about how students’ money is spent that is one of the reasons why students elect them in the first place.

Unfortunately, last year’s USG Finance Committee saw fit to forget how to carefully manage money as well as commit other transgressions during its tumultuous year in office. This year’s latest debacle only is an aftershock of how USG operated last year.