The Student Services Finance Committee picked up where it left off at Monday night’s meeting and continued to cut the Multicultural Student Coalition’s budget by an additional $24,985.16 in mainly computers, hardware and software items and further chopped approximately $19,000 in program supplies, food and t-shirts from the group’s proposed budget. The final decision on the committee’s suggestion, however, was tabled for yet another meeting to be held Monday.
The committee did decide to allocate $6800 on the Polygon Engineering Student Council’s original request for $7,200. The cuts stemmed from a request for food during its annual “Battle of the Bands.” Talks of reducing the group’s budget to the minimal funding were quickly diffused, though the committee reminded the student organization to keep funding where they originally budgeted it in their proposal.
Polygon’s representative, Josh Anders, a University of Wisconsin sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering, said he thought there could be a little better communication in order for things to run more efficiently, but he was pleased with the decision.
“I think SSFC does a very good job deciding on what they have to decide … which is budgets,” he said.
Polygon is a student organization that serves as an umbrella organization for several student groups within the College of Engineering. The group, among other things, acts as a communicator between the different fields of engineering and the administration. Its request was delayed for several meetings due to what the committee thought was lack of clarification on some issues presented in the budget.
The Wednesday meeting started with about an hour and a half of open forum, possibly the cause of another delay on MCSC’s decision. Committee members said they more than welcome the views of others but wish they could get to work earlier on budgets.
Student Judiciary, the Associated Students of Madison’s court division, made its budget proposal shortly after open forum and requested $50,885, a budget that will be debated on at the committee’s next meeting.
Though some at the meeting thought it was incongruous to have MCSC’s budget decision span more than a week, vice-chair of the committee Jenell Wise said it was because of both the scrutiny of committee members and the complexity of the budget.
“It is a very complicated budget,” she said. “It’s a lot of information to go over.”
She went on to say that a lot of clarification and committee members’ scrutiny has gone into every budget this year and that members want to know not just what is needed, but how it is justified.
