Associated Students of Madison‘s Student Council is set to hold an extra meeting tonight to discuss and ratify its internal budget as well as the budgets of several grassroots committees, after delaying the decisions at last week’s meeting.
The Feb. 10 meeting was planned to address several budgets for review and approval from the Student Council.
The budgets scheduled to be decided are for ASM Student Council, SSFC, General Student Services Funding and the ASM internal budget, which consists of other grassroots committees such as Legislative Affairs and Academic Affairs.
During the Feb. 17 meeting, the SSFC budget, the Student Activity Center Governing Board budget and the GSSF budgets are slated to be read before the ASM Student Council begins to review its internal budget, ASM Rep. Maxwell Love said.
The budgets have been reviewed by the Student Services Finance Committee throughout the semester and must be ratified by the ASM Student Council in order to be instituted across campus, SSFC Chair Brandon Williams said.
ASM Chair Tyler Junger said the meetings are not so much about the time it takes to discuss the budget, but rather reaching the right decision with regard to student funds.
He went on to emphasize how important the discussions on the budgets are, as they involve not only the respective budgets of the committees but also the entire student body as the council decides the fate of thousands of dollars of student funds.
If the budgets fail to be approved in the meeting, however, the budgets are deferred to a Conference Committee to review the budgets. They are then put before Student Council to be ratified again, Williams said.
He added according to SSFC bylaws, the budgets must be ratified by Mar. 15. However, the effective deadline is Mar. 3 when they are put before the chancellor for final review.
If the ASM Student Council fails to review and ratify all the proposed budgets, the remaining budgets could fall past the SSFC deadline and default to the last ratified budget, Williams said.
Due to heavy debate in the meeting and a delay due to the spring ASM Kickoff and Pig Roast, the last meeting ran short, only approving the budget of the Student Judiciary — the smallest in both size and scope of all of the proposed meetings, Williams said.
The ASM Kickoff, an event designed to introduce new students to many of the committees of ASM, ran later to accommodate the schedules of more students.
ASM scheduled the kickoff so late the day of the meeting because they knew they had extra time to discuss the budgets [the] next week, Junger said.
After the initial delay, due to a 45-minute open forum among the Student Council representatives followed by a 45-minute session to decide what order the budgets should have been presented, there was only an hour and forty minutes to discuss the budgets, Williams said, which led to the need for today’s meeting.
