Associated Students of Madison members passed the Associated Students of Madison internal and General Student Services Funds budgets onto Student Services Finance Committee Sunday after weeks of additional meetings because ASM failed to pass the budgets on time.
The Conference Committee passed the ASM internal budget of $1,118,204.05 onto SSFC for an “up-down” vote on the budget after debate on a number of services provided through ASM.
The budget, after approval from SSFC, will be passed back to the Student Council.
The committee also added $17,333.50 to the GSSF budget to accommodate Greater University Tutoring Services.
Of the increase, $16,000 will be tuition remission for staff positions and $1,333.50 will be to cover the costs for a webmaster.
The GSSF budget will also undergo the same approval process as the ASM internal.
A number of committee members said throughout the course of the meeting that based on the debate, it was clear who would be voting “aye” or “nay” even before the vote was called.
Student Council allocated $50,000 to the new Housing and Tenant Support project during its Feb. 17 meeting. Conference Committee reduced the overall budget to $40,000.
Brandon Williams, SSFC chair, said the committee cut the funding because $50,000 would not be the startup cost of the program.
ASM Secretary Kurt Gosselin proposed if there is no written tentative proposal from SSFC by May 1 on how to get the program started, the program would be zero funded. The proposal passed unanimously.
Tyler Junger, ASM chair, said the ASM Shared Governance Committee is neither efficient nor competitive with other universities’ student governments’ Shared Governance committees.
He attributed this in part to the fact that Chair Melissa Hanley has many administrative responsibilities instead of working on coherence between committees.
“We do shared governance poorly and that has to change,” Junger said.
Gosselin said Hanley’s role has deteriorated to appointing people to committees, and he proposed four more people who would essentially work on behalf of the chair to coordinate the flow back to the shared governance chair.
SSFC Rep. Andrea Nichols said there was the possibility there were too many ideas and too many increases to the budget.
The committee unanimously cut $500 from the ASM Textbook Swap. The money allocated would have been used for equipment to increase capacity of the swap, but members of the committee did not think the numbers presented accurately represented the cost of the equipment.
The Student Organization Fair received $500 to its budget, with the reasoning that providing student organizations with the means to get members and a way for students to find the organizations compliments the services SSFC funds to the organizations.
Student Council Rep. Max Love made a motion to fund the Campus Organizer position, which was cut by Student Council last semester. Love said the it fostered leadership in students involved in ASM.
Echoing the sentiments of most of the committee members, Matt Beemsterboer, Finance Committee chair, opposed the motion, on the grounds that students in ASM do not need their hands held to grow into leaders.
The motion to bring funding back to the Campus Organizer position failed.
