The Student Services Finance Committee determined its spring
2008 budget timeline Thursday in its first meeting of the semester.

SSFC met in the Beefeater room of Memorial Union to
discuss the committee?s upcoming events. The committee has divided its duties
of the semester into two parts. In the first part of the semester, the
committee plans to have a series of discussions to better understand the
complicated budgets of non-allocable funds.

?These budgets ? account for roughly 79 percent of
segregated fees,? SSFC member Adam Porton said. ?We are going to hear a
presentation on how to read them and then we will hear these [budgets] over
about a month?s time.?

The committee plans to address the budgets of different
organizations on campus including the Wisconsin Union, recreational sports and
University Health Services.

?We will also go through some of the other parts of
[Associated Students of Madison] such as the bus passes, student activity
centers, and ASM is trying to push forward a rape crisis contract with a
community agency, either the hospital or the rape crisis center,? SSFC Chair
Alex Gallagher said.

After coming across litigation for their bylaws being
vague, SSFC plans to spend the second half of the semester working on revising
them. Gallagher admits, ?they aren?t fantastically written bylaws.?

?We are consistently trying to make them more
transparent, and now that we have the time to be able to do it, we?re going to
go back through and look at where the problems are,? Gallagher said.

At the meeting, the group also established two different
subcommittees that will divide up the more detailed work on budgets this
semester. Porton will be chairing a subcommittee focused primarily on General
Student Services Fund organizations.

?It is policies [ranging] from what money can be spent
on, how they have to apply, what the forms will look like and what the timeline
is going to look like,? Porton said. ?We?re really just seeing if anything
needs to be changed and improved upon.?

According to Porton, the second committee will be
chaired by SSFC Secretary Kurt Gosselin, and will be dealing with ?a new
revenue strain designed for organizations that are not registered student organizations
and therefore are not eligible for normal funding from our committee, but that
we still feel are valuable to the community and deserve [segregated] fees
because they serve students.?

The committee spent most of the fall semester working
with GSSF regulations to determine whether certain organizations were eligible
for specific funds. Their plans for this semester will be much less hectic,
Gallagher said.

The group is currently working on the budget for the
2008-09 school year, which they will present to the chancellor as a package.

?I think that one thing students are concerned about is
the level that they are paying in segregated fees and how that impacts the
activities on campus,? Gallagher said. ?We are trying to strike a balance
between providing services, activities and things that students get involved in
while still representing something that?s financially stable.?

Since they have been working to regulate where fees are
allocated segregated fees should decrease next year, according to Gallagher.