[media-credit name=’JEFF SCHORFHEIDE/Herald photo’ align=’alignright’ width=’336′][/media-credit]Students will be offered free bus rides around campus and the city again next year, as the Student Services Finance Committee approved the budget for another year of service with Madison Metro.

SSFC, the financial branch of Associated Students of Madison, met last Monday under closed session to discuss the proposed ASM bus pass budget, which was resolved after little debate and concluded with a unanimous vote in approval to pass the budget.

"[The bus pass] is very important because millions of rides are used every year. It allows our students to live off campus," SSFC secretary Kellie Sanders said. "It allows students to get jobs off-campus and travel around — it also improves traffic and parking for those who don't ride the bus."

The group "Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment" also submitted its proposal Thursday after violating a policy by having students work too many hours. They gave examples on improving their current system to avoid future violations of students working above the 20-hour-per-week limit.

"We take this offense very seriously, as an organization and as student workers. We do support the rule to work no more than 20 hours a week," PAVE chair Gina Bower said in her proposal. "Every week we will require the leaders to pull out the payroll sheet that shows all sorts of things, to make sure no one goes over 20 hours. [Student employees] will also undergo the official training in the spring in addition to the one in the fall as well."

According to Lapidus, the overtime hours violated an SSFC policy.

"It is pretty serious, because it is a very set-in-stone rule that you cannot work (more than) 20 hours a week." Lapidus said. "So it is a very significant violation of university policy and a SSFC policy as a result."

While SSFC was in unanimous favor to allow PAVE to make improvements before taking further action, Sanders said the session essentially resulted in a verbal warning to PAVE, with SSFC guaranteeing stricter consequences, in particular freezing their funding, should the violation recur.

The new Chronos system, which was implemented only recently at UW, is used by PAVE to record student employee hours.

"Chronos allows students basically to punch digitally so it doesn't leave a very messy paper trail." Lapidus said.

SSFC representative Byron Eagan questioned the Chronos system during the session, stressing the importance that members of PAVE receiving the additional training.