One USG official called USG President Kim Clemens irresponsible and a defender of a big-time special interest group for her support of maintaining SPC funds at their current level. Other people have backed Clemens, saying SPC is the only Registered Student Organization that truly involves the entire student body.

Wouldn’t it be nice if this bickering was ended for good?

A resolution USG is working on has the potential to do this. We think it is a great idea, but we also recognize a reparable flaw in the plan.

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If the resolution is passed, funding for SPC will become off the top. This means a specific amount of money from student fees will be allocated to SPC every year instead of USG deciding how much money the the council will get every year.

There are two benefits with this arrangement. First, SPC officials would know how much money they have to work with further in advance. At the same time, USG would be able to pay more attention to allocating funds to other organizations.

To top it all off, the resolution would create an advisory board that would monitor SPC’s use of the funds. This board would not only ensure that SPC is not squandering the money it would be guaranteed to receive annually; it would also provide good feedback to SPC about its programs at the board’s monthly meetings.

The present arrangement doesn’t ensure a constant flow of communication between SPC and its constituents. If a board that has representatives from various constituent groups met monthly, SPC would get input from the student body on a regular basis when ideas are fresh.

We think this is better than looking at a year’s worth of SPC programs when it comes time to allocate funds to the organization.

There is one big problem with the resolution, however. It would increase the amount of money the Graduate and Professional Student Council will give SPC from $5,000 to $18,000.

USG officials justify this increase by noting that the $18,000 figure is about 14 percent of the money allocated to SPC in the resolution. Since graduate students traditionally make up about 14 percent of the student body, people at USG say this percentage would be GPSC’s fair share.

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This may be true, but GPSC funds Registered Student Organizations other than SPC. With the GPSC budget running around $84,000, members of the group rightfully maintain that such a cut would leave them with few options besides reducing funds for other RSOs.

We think a possible solution may be an evaluation of how much graduate students actually use the programs something GPSC says it is working on now. USG members have indicated that could be a plausible way to evaluate how much GPSC should contribute to SPC annually.

Even if it is determined that graduate students make up 14 percent of the audience at SPC functions, we do not think it is reasonable to require GPSC to increase its SPC funding 260 percent. This is exactly what the resolution calls for, and such an increase is too big to implement at once.

GPSC members have said they are willing to give SPC more money but not the amount required by the resolution, which obviously would put GPSC in a bind.

It may be a better idea to have GPSC and USG negotiate GPSC’s funding percentage and implement the increase over a few years instead of all at once.