News

Student Council approves ancillary funds for WSUM

The Associated Students of Madison approved ancillary funding Wednesday for student radio WSUM, giving the organization a guarantee that it would have funding for at least three years if the Finance Committee chooses to cut its budget in the future.

According to Kurt Gosselin, Student Services Finance Committee chair, the ancillary fund is a three-year rolling horizon budget program. The fund would guarantee WSUM 80 percent of their initial funds for the first year if they are not approved for regular funding, and if not eligible for funds the second year, they would receive 50 percent of the original budget. 

“The ancillary fund creates a secured source of funding for WSUM, something that is protected from the whims of a single year’s decision,” Gosselin said. 

According to Dave Black, general manager and co-founder of WSUM, if funding was cut from the organization before it was protected under ancillary funding, students would be required to tear down the radio tower within 60 days.

The tower would then have to be rebuilt if funding for the station was reinstated. According to Gosselin, rebuilding the tower could cost more than $500,000.

“Student radio provides students with great job opportunities and experiences,” said Adam Porton, SSFC vice chair. “Having a forum for students to be on the radio is a great service to students.”

WSUM has a listening demographic of approximately 120,000, and it is budgeted at $319,098.87 for the 2008-09 academic year.

Gosselin said switching WSUM to ancillary funding is simply an administrative change.

“[The General Student Services Fund] mostly funds programs run by student organizations,” Gosselin said. “All that is changing here is the manner in which the funding is granted and the administrative classification.”

The council also approved a timeline recommended by the ASM Constitutional Committee on Tuesday that would put its new constitution in place next spring.

“The Constitutional Committee has invested a lot of time and research and has really made an effort to research alternatives and possibilities and put them together in what we’re hoping is a very comprehensive document,” Gosselin said. 

According to Gosselin, adopting this timeline was necessary to successfully involve more of the campus in writing the new constitution.

“The committee really felt that whatever we produce and put out there should be the highest quality possible,” Gosselin said. “There needs to be an embedding process where it’s not just this committee, but the entire campus that is getting involved.”

Student Council also approved the job descriptions for three ASM Press Office positions. While these positions had already been vaguely characterized, they needed to be more clearly defined, said ASM Chair Brittany Wiegand.

“We’ll be posting the job descriptions in various places and we’re going to open up the nominations again for these positions,” Wiegand said. “We’ll get through interviews and the nominations board will present the council with recommendations for the positions.”

The offered positions for ASM’s Press Office are director, assistant director, and webmaster.

Weigand said she hopes ASM can pass along recommendations from the nominations board for new positions to the council by their next meeting on Sept. 24.