Emotions ran heated and high at last night’s Student Association meeting, with gallery members shouting from the nearly full gallery down at the assembly, and assembly members shouting back.

‘I feel like I’m in a dream,’ said Vice President Travis Mason, during the meeting.

The assembly voted on the SA Finance Board’s budget recommendations in divvying out the student fee to student organizations. But many representatives from the student organizations were angry with the amount of money the assembly approved for each group.

‘Students aren’t getting the money that they want, and they’re not getting the presence that they want,’ said Adam Gorode, a music industry sophomore and representative of University Union Concerts. ‘And it’s all a representation of apathy of the student body.’

After the assembly completed its voting on the recommendations, Comptroller Maggie Misztal, SA President Drew Lederman and Mason addressed the remaining gallery members about reform to the budget allocation process to alleviate the mass’s discontent.

Lederman pounded the gavel on the podium multiple times throughout the meeting and called for order when people in the gallery and the assembly shouted over each other. The assembly members even took a ten-minute recess near the end of the voting to discuss how to conduct the rest of the meeting in a more orderly fashion.

‘Everyone is losing it, everyone is losing their professionalism, everyone,’ Mason said, in a plea to crowd. ‘We need to discuss and we need to move on.’

Misztal, visibly upset at several points throughout the meeting, excused herself from the assembly for about 10 minutes to regain her composure.

Misztal knew the meeting would be very tense and angry before it began, because she received phone calls about the recommendations before she finished putting them in the student organizations’ mailboxes, she said.

‘There have been some allegations against me, and I am extremely, extremely offended,’ Misztal said before the voting started. ‘SA has an emphasis on individual funding on student organizations and emphasis on funding programs that cannot be funded through other sources.’

The assembly voted on the requests within three main categories: publications, programming and operations which included Hill TV, SU Ambulance and WJPZ.

Many members of the gallery burst into applause when the assembly voted against the only rejected recommendations: a $20,000 speaker event and $40,000 concert, both for Homecoming next fall.

‘Now we have money for appeals, we have something to work with,’ Misztal said.

Many members of the gallery said that large amounts of money were allocated to certain groups on campus, such as Hillel’s allocation of $20,000 for a speaker, but that smaller groups received next-to-nothing, even if they wanted to host similar events.

UU plans to co-sponsor many events next year and get input from other organizations and work side-by-side with them, said Dennis Jacobs, chair of UU Speakers and next year’s UU president.

‘Things need to change, and it’s going to take time and commitment,’ Jacobs said.

Some gallery members also said that finance board members did not answer the question as to why certain parts of their requests were cut.

Finance board members make their decisions partially based on the success of past events or publications sponsored by student organizations, Misztal said.

But smaller, newer organizations need money to get their programs going and advertised to become successful, said some gallery members.

The finance board received $1.8 million in requests, but could only fund $490,000 in operations funds, $465,000 in programming funds and $35,000 in publication funds, Misztal said. The SA budget was stretched even thinner this year because it included allocation for Juice Jam and Homecoming.

The space allocation costs went up 50 percent this year, which all drastically affected the budget process, Misztal said.

Several groups’ programming funding requests – such as ACACIA, Fashion’s Conscience, the NAACP, and UU Cinemas – were lower than what the groups initially anticipated.

Several representatives from student publications questioned the reason for cutting funds to their publication.

Jen Gong, an editor from A-Line magazine, also questioned the reason for the cut in their funding.

Finance board members, who reduced A-Line’s request from $2,441.60 to $1,000, said that the magazine would need to be produced with cheaper costs.

Nicole Edwards, editor in chief of the Black Voice, said that cuts from many organizations will negatively affect advertising funds and article material for the Black Voice. And next year, it may not receive as much funding because it did not do as well it had in the past.

‘It just takes away from my advertising; it just takes away from my coverage, and what are you going to tell me next year?’ Edwards said. ‘I won’t have anything to cover, it affects me directly.’

Lederman asked Edwards to leave the room if she could not be quiet and respectful.

‘Nicole, I want you to leave,’ Lederman said.

‘I want my funding,’ Edwards said.

‘We ask you to please leave,’ Lederman responded.

‘I can do whatever the fuck I want,’ Edwards said.

After the votes ended, several gallery and SA members discussed formal changes that could streamline and equalize the budget process.

Some suggestions to improve relations between organizations and SA included posting the SA’s agenda weekly on the SA Web site and forming a Student Organizational Council where representatives from each organization could both learn SA’s procedures and express the group’s need and interests.

‘This is completely over my head; it’s completely over the finance board’s head at this point,’ Misztal said. ‘But we need to make sure this energy doesn’t die.’

The administration, including the Office of Greek Life and Experiential Learning, are more to blame than SA because it controls much of what SA can do, said both SA members and members of the gallery.

‘My request from you is that you come to these Monday night meetings so we can hear your needs, and you can find out what we’re doing so we can avoid the crap that happened tonight,’ said assembly member Jeff Paquette.

Published on April 19, 2004 at 12:00 pm