SAC regroups, awaits budget

With Student Council (StuCo) still in the midst of recreating its bylaws, the Student Activities Commission (SAC) remains in existence under provisional terms but has recommenced regular activity. The SAC announced several policy amendments at their General Assembly (GA) meeting Monday and must now wait to be rewritten into the StuCo bylaws and to have their budget for next year approved.

After a semester of tight finances, the SAC is back "in good shape," according to Chairperson Ben Wardlow. The SAC received back just under $30,000 in annual auditing and has requested a larger acting budget for next year, which will go into effect when Class A student groups request their annual budgets March 12. In preparation for their new fiscal year beginning in April, the new amendments are meant to establish a more conservative funding policy for student groups.

"I don't think we've changed our standards," said SAC Special Interests Liaison Hope Kelaher. "We're trying to make it more clear to the groups about what we can fund. It's unfortunate that some of the groups have taken it personally, [but] from a fiscal standpoint, I think groups understand the constraints." The SAC approved 13 new groups this year to bring the number to 185, which has remained unchanged since October.

The new amendments were distributed to student group leaders Monday. Among the updates, travel is now considered separately from conference funding. No student travel will be funded beyond 300 miles. After a year of constitutional approval, new groups must undergo a "mandatory evaluation" to determine whether they can remain in the SAC. Groups with incomplete proposals will not be heard.

The Blue Book is the official funding policy of the SAC and was officially updated last summer.

The official student group allocation request was recently submitted to the Office of Student Life by Director of Student Involvement Jeff Groden Thomas. Within the larger programming budget, which he is "not allowed to disclose," he has requested a $5,000 increase for the SAC.

Last year, the SAC budget began at $415,000. After the GA Monday, student group leaders expressed general frustration with the recent volatility of StuCo and SAC. JOSH publicity coordinator Sadena Therurajuh said she felt the recent amendments instituted necessary fiscal conservativeness but that SAC's financial struggles this year could have been addressed earlier and "prevented better."

"It [StuCo and SAC] is too disorganized. They try, but it's mayhem," said Nat Duca, chairperson of the Association for Computing Machinery. "Now is a very difficult time to be a club doing anything." Andy Bette, president of the Animation Club, agreed, saying that he felt the SAC was "in shambles."

SAC Cultural Liaison Jon Groce said he empathized with student groups seeking funding but said that they are encouraged to seek other funding sources as well.

"It kind of bothers me that people are up in arms, saying that we mismanaged. We are managing. We had to create a policy," he said.

Last semester, the SAC declared itself in an unprecedented "Red Zone," when its October accounts reached below 10 percent of its annual budget. Since then, the SAC has received about $30,000 back from auditing student groups for the 2002-3 year. More changes arrived in early December, when the student body approved a referendum to completely restructure StuCo and negate all of their bylaws. The SAC, which has traditionally been linked to StuCo, was placed under temporary supervision of Groden Thomas so that it could continue to hear student group proposals.

When the new by-laws pass, SAC will be linked to the new senatorial Committee on Finance, although the specifics of oversight are still unclear. SAC Chairman Ben Wardow said the bylaws could mandate anything from general auditing to complete review power, which he hopes would not happen. Under the former bylaws, SAC was the ruling body for delegating funding to student groups.

Along with restructuring its byl-aws, the StuCo also recently moved its Web site to an independent server. Their site, http://jhu.stuco.org, has been malfunctioning since the beginning of the semester. The site holds links to all other StuCo organizations, including the SAC, and so the SAC site is not accessible either.Groden Thomas noted that despite this year's tight funding, Hopkins has a large allocation for student programming compared to other local schools. He said that Towson University, with 11,875 undergraduates, has a student group budget of about $200,000 per year.

Duke University has 6,033 undergraduates, 238 student government-recognized student groups and a student group allocation of about $500,000 per year, according to Steve Burrell, advisor in the Duke University Office of Student Activities and Facilities.