SAC changes budget policies

The Student Activities Commission (SAC) Executive Board met this weekend in an annual budgeting deliberation to determine funding appropriations for student groups during the 2004-05 school year. In an effort to avoid running into a financial crunch, similar to this year's "red zone," the SAC made more conservative funding decisions for next year.

The SAC will announce how much funding each student group will receive at the SAC General Assembly, on Monday at 5:30 p.m. in the Glass Pavilion.

Over the weekend, the SAC met for 16 hours and produced a budget that would set aside $100,000 to the regular SAC contingency, said Student Council (StuCo) Treasurer Ben Warlow.

Warlow added that the SAC divided up the $206,000 remaining of the $306,000 budget "as fairly and evenly as we could according to our funding policy."

"One of the problems that occurred this year was that last year's Board basically didn't leave us nearly enough money in contingency, especially with a pretty open-minded funding proposal guidelines," Warlow said.

This year, Warlow said, "We've been more conservative with our funding policies ... so we could keep next year's Board from having the same problems we had this year."

The SAC Executive Board altered its philosophy when determining funds from last year.

According to Grace Gallick,'06, SAC political action liaison and StuCo treasurer-elect, the SAC entered its annual budgeting meetings with the philosophy that they should have an ability to allocate more money over the course of the school year, rather than depleting their resources in the beginning in the year.

"There were a lot of things we categorically could not fund, which cut down on the time that it took to go through," said Gallick, "Other than that, we tended to spend a lot of time on things that were more of a decision on our parts as opposed to things that we definitely fund or cannot fund."

Last October, the SAC entered a financial crunch period known as the "red zone," when the committee fell below 10 percent of its operating budget. The SAC emerged from the financial crisis with an audit and reallocation of funds.

"There are a lot of misconceptions about the purpose of annual budgeting, and the main goal is for groups that have shown consistent annual programming to get the money that they need so they don't have to come in frequently during the year," said Gallick.

The SAC budget will follow a different procedure this year for approval. The budget will be announced at the General Assembly meeting (GA), where student financial leaders will vote on it. According to Gallick, the groups at the meeting will receive a sheet that lists the amount each of the groups requested and how much they will receive. The sheet will lay out all of the finances according to what is available to spend, how much SAC allocated during annual budgeting and how much funding will be available for requests over the course of the 2004-05 school year. When the budget is passed at the GA, it moves to StuCo, where the finance committee will have to approve it before it becomes official and the treasurers of the groups will vote on it.

--Staff Writer Xiao-bo Yuan contributed to this article.