After University of Wisconsin’s Associated Students of Madison panicked over a debt of $180,000 owed to the state following the passage of the state budget, Vice Chancellor Darrell Bazzell stumbled upon a solution just prior to last week’s Board of Regents meeting.
In total, UW-Madison must pay back a total of $2.2 million from University Auxiliary Units, including non-allocable and allocable segregated fees, in order to support financial aid.
Segregated fees are paid by every student to support student services such as student groups, University Health Services and the construction of a new Union South.
While ASM was originally expected to come up with $181,491 of that cut, UW’s student government should not have to worry since the money will now come from the general segregated fee appropriation.
“They can look beyond just the ASM budget to come up with their reduction. Once they actually look at the [General Student Services Fund] portion of the budget … we think that there is going to be more than enough under-spending to cover their cut,” Bazzell said.
According to Assistant Dean Drew Wielgus in the Offices of the Dean of Students, while it appears there is money available from the under-spent GSSF funds to cover the discrepancy, it is not 100 percent certain because given the numbers and paperwork for the last fiscal year are still being processed.
?”At the end of the day all the funding that ASM is responsible for … is a place of savings where the money could come from,” Wielgus said.
The problem arose when Doyle requested money from all UW System reserve funds using numbers from June 2008.?
ASM Chair Tyler Junger, along with other ASM leaders, met several times to discuss the options they had. Before hearing from Bazzell, they came up with four different plans, as laid out by the ASM leaders in a statement: Require GSSF groups and ASM to cut a percentage of their budgets, raise student segregated fees, cut SAFEride or challenge the authority of the state.
Although they found SAFEride to be an underused and costly service, they felt that such a small group of students should not make the decision to cut the program. Junger added, however, they will further look into reducing or cutting SAFEride later in the semester.
None of the options seemed very appealing, according to Junger, and they are very thankful to Bazzell for helping them to find the best option for students.
“If there is an outcome that could be best for students … this is the best one because students have already given this money to UW,” Junger said.
