Rules may be made to be broken, but the Student Activities Finance Board wants to make its guidelines more impenetrable than Fort Knox.
SAFB wants to make it more difficult to override its procedures because the Senate voted several times during Spring Funding to suspend its guidelines — a move that could have left some student groups out to dry, said Ramesh Srinivasan, Associated Student Government financial vice president.
Senators succeeded in suspending the guidelines six out of the nine times the motion was proposed during the funding debates, in which Senate had a record-high $125,000 to allocate.
“A lot of the antagonism had to do with an amendment pool that was too big and (suspension of) the rules,” said Srinivasan, a Weinberg junior. “The point of the funding process is to provide a consistent set of rules that will ensure fairness above anything else to all the student groups. It’s not something that should just be changed on the fly by a simple 51 percent.”
Senators plan to vote on a bill tonight that would recategorize some SAFB guidelines — which are relatively easy to amend — as ASG bylaws. Instead of the majority vote required to suspend guidelines, changing bylaws would require a two-thirds majority vote. Any amendment to the bylaws also must be submitted a week before it can be voted on, whereas suspension of the guidelines is a motion that can be voted on immediately.
If this bill had been in place at the funding meeting, Srinivasan said it would have prevented some of the financial maneuvering.
When ASG began funding student groups April 26, senators recognized that groups were asking for much more money than they had available to dole out. In an unusual move, they passed motions to suspend the guidelines and bring $40,000 from Fall Quarter’s supplemental pool to spring funding. They also funded 11 of the 43 groups that requested money.
For the next meeting, when the remaining 32 groups received funds, Senate had only about $42,000 of the original $125,000 amendment pool. Again, senators suspended the guidelines — this time to reconsider the $55,000 that went to A&O Productions and to take more money from supplemental funding. Ultimately Senate decided against the idea, arguing that the proposal would be unfair to student groups.
Senators plan to vote on the bill when the Senate meets at 6 p.m. tonight. They also plan to vote on 11 other bills and elect seven members to the SAFB.
