Recent Associated Student Government Executive Boards partook in a traditional $700 dinner and spent thousands on events such as Senate and Executive Board retreats using university money, The daily found after investigating an audit trail report of ASG’s finances provided by former Executive Vice President Howard W. Buffett.

The spending was funded by donations from the Office of Student Affairs and did not involve money from the Student Activities Finance Board. The student affairs fund, sometimes referred to as the “special projects” fund, is also used to contribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day programming and ASG-sponsored events, such as Friday After Class.

Officials in Student Affairs encouraged both the dinners and the retreats. But the board of former ASG President Jane Lee, a Weinberg senior, began a series of reforms to pare down expenses during this school year.

Buffett, a Communication junior, said he provided the documents to draw attention to the need for ASG reform and transparency:

“Because you ask, ‘Was there transparency before this?’ No.”

$700 Dinner

Stapled to the back of the ASG audit was a photocopied bill for dinner at Chicago’s Caf� Spiaggia, 980 N. Michigan Ave. For 18 appetizers and 18 entr�es, the bill totaled $586.15 — $703.30 with gratuity. It was dated May 21, 2004.

Members of the outgoing Executive Board said the check was for a “transition dinner,” an event that marked the passing of the torch between the outgoing and incoming Executive Boards.

The president, three vice presidents and eight internal positions comprise the Executive Board.

Transition dinners were considered a tradition, said Communication senior Matt Hall, who joined the board as Secretary/Parliamentarian in February 2003. Hall remained on the board for three years — most recently as Speaker of the Senate. Past board members, including Hall, disapproved of the expensive dinners, he said.

A year earlier, the board dined at Nine, a haute cuisine Chicago steakhouse at 440 W. Randolph St. that features items such as a $25 Kobe beef hamburger and a $37 filet mignon on the menu. Before Nine, the board chose the Ralph Lauren Restaurant at 115 E. Chicago Ave., Hall said.

After attending the get-together at Ralph Lauren, Hall said, he recused himself from the next two dinners in protest.

Former Academic Vice President Prajwal Ciryam, who ate at both the Nine and Cafe Spiaggia dinners, said some new board members attended the events with uneasiness, but they were assured the meals were standard practice.

“We got the feeling that, ‘OK, this is the way things have been done,'” said Ciryam, a Weinberg junior. “And, ‘There really isn’t anything wrong with it,’ and we were just overreacting.”

The dinners were something of an open secret. They were mentioned in passing to some senators, like former Phi Mu Alpha-Sigma Alpha Iota Sen. Gabe Matlin.

Now ASG’s interim Rules Chair, the McCormick senior said he wondered why so much of ASG was cloaked in secrecy. Why were all board meetings closed to the public? Or why, as he had heard, did the board have a secondary account cryptically referred to as “special projects”?

“Why do we have to have all this secret stuff in this organization?” Matlin said. “Why do they have to do all this stuff behind closed doors? Aren’t they supposed to be working for us?”

Matlin’s curiosity berthed a bill to make all board meetings public, a piece of legislation that he said “never went anywhere.”

But as this school year wore on, an idea to open up ASG’s books gained momentum, culminating in a school-wide referendum that ended in legal limbo amid questions of state and federal law, as well as university policy.

Those legal ambiguities became moot with Buffett and the audit trail.

$4,000 Retreat

“Special projects,” it turns out, was money donated by the Office of Student Affairs to ASG for “operational costs.”

Hall said the fund was an enigma for all but the president and treasurer, who set the budget. The rest of the board didn’t have any input in how the money was spent.

“We were not told how much there was, where it was coming from, why it was there,” Hall said. “Even if you were on the board, you just weren’t told.”

The annual sum has historically hovered between $8,000 to $10,000, according to documents obtained by the Daily. The money was intended partly for “team building” experiences — transition dinners, and Executive Board and Senate retreats, said Vice President of Student Affairs William Banis.

Banis would not comment on whether the dinner was excessive, but said ASG had quoted him a cost per head that seemed reasonable.

Regardless, Banis said he thought the transition dinners had intrinsic value. He said every organization needs time to come together, set goals and get to know one another.

The need is particularly pressing for ASG’s Executive Board, he added.

“Everyone is elected as an individual,” Banis said. “And they’re thrown into this blender and asked to function as a team, when they didn’t run on a platform as a party.”

Knowing the purpose and the source of funds for the transition dinners, Matlin said, he was still skeptical of their worth.

“Bill Banis might see the value in that kind of thing,” Matlin said. “In the business world, people seem to care more about team building and that kind of thing. In my opinion, it’s way more money than they need for that kind of activity.”

But for some Executive Board members, the transition dinners, as well as quarterly dinners for the sitting board, were justified as business meetings.

“In my opinion, this isn’t money that would be going to programming if it wasn’t going to ASG,” said former ASG Treasurer John J. Hughes III. “There was nothing unethical. The people who gave this money knew what it was being used for.”

The Weinberg senior and former Daily Forum editor emphasized that in the grand scheme of ASG’s budget, the money spent on dinners — even as a fraction of the “special projects” fund — was very small.

For Hughes, the annual senate retreat — also funded through Student Affairs money — was a far greater waste of cash.

“The Senate retreat is a vacation,” Hughes said. “You go there, you melt marshmallows, you do ropes courses, and that’s it.”

A 2004 retreat at Lake Geneva in Wisconsin cost more than $4,000.

By comparison, the Student Union of the Washington University in St. Louis spent $1,500 this year on an overnight retreat for about 100 senators, according to its president, David Ader. They went to a local YMCA camp, he said.

Princeton University’s undergraduate student government runs a $250 on-campus retreat for its 30 representatives, according to its president, Leslie-Bernard Joseph.

ASG’s 2003 retreat was punctuated with an ice cream cruise around Lake Geneva for the roughly 50 senators in attendance.

“You get on an old-timey wooden boat, you take a cruise around Lake Geneva for a couple hours,” said Medill junior Jonathan Love, a three-year senator who attended the event.

The ice cream cruise might have been superfluous — it was cut in 2004 — but the majority of each retreat was spent becoming acquainted with ASG rules and practices, he said.

“It’s a cost-benefit analysis,” Love said. “I think that we get a benefit from the retreat we’re going on. If other groups are getting a similar benefit for a lower cost, we should explore doing it their way.”

New Day Rising

As “transparency” became a buzzword this winter, the Executive Board of President Jane Lee began trimming expenses from the “special projects” fund. At its quarterly business dinner, the board opted for sandwiches from Potbelly’s, paid for out of pocket.

In February, Hughes submitted the Executive Board’s budget request to the Senate — the lowest in four years, cutting ar
ound $8,000 in total. The tight budget was a product of his and Lee’s ambition to balance ASG’s books.

The majority of the board eventually agreed to stop using university money to pay for dinners. Some thought the dinners were too lavish, others thought it would help ASG’s reputation.

One person who was interested in maintaining the tradition was Sara Whitaker, the campus public relations chairwoman.

“Some people came to the conclusion that this would not be the best thing for ASG to do — not that (the dinner) was wrong, not that it was dishonest,” the Communication junior said.

She attributed the choice to the bad press ASG had received.

“I think The DAILY went out of its way to paint an ugly picture that forced us to take drastic measures,” Whitaker said.

Lee, a Weinberg senior, disagreed with Whitaker’s assessment. The dinner, she said, probably would be cut as a result of her commitment to cut back spending.

The new Executive Board under President Patrick Keenan-Devlin, a Music junior, plans on continuing the trend.

Senate’s speaker Dan Broadwell is looking into new, cheaper locations and planning to bind senator packets by hand. The Executive Board retreat, a $1000 event in the past, is tentatively planned for Keenan-Devlin’s house.

Despite good intentions, former Academic Vice President Ciryam said past boards might have exercised poor judgement. Nobody planned an event “looking to do something wrong,” he said, but there were mistakes.

That’s why he said ASG should be more transparent, he said.

“Boards will choose projects, select things to purchase, that in retrospect don’t seem wise,” Ciryam said. “Everybody in an office like this should be held accountable for those mistakes so those mistakes don’t happen in the future.”

Reach Jordan Weissmann at [email protected].

Paper Trail

A year ago, ASG gathered atCafe Spiaggia in Chicago, where they spent more than $700 for a meal that included 18 entr�es.