The Student Services Finance Committee debated over Promoting Awareness Victim Empowerment’s budget, the biggest matter of contention that caused a lengthy discussion at Monday’s meeting.
PAVE had an initial request of enough funding for 10 members to attend the National Association of Student Personal Administrators conference. SSFC Vice Chair Brett DuCharme motioned for this number of people to be reduced to four.
Rep. David Morel responded, calling for the number to be increased from four to seven, but that motion failed.
Following this motion, another was made calling for the number of members allowed to attend to be changed to five, which gave PAVE $2,875 to spend. This motion was passed, but Rep. Colin Barushok said it was not a good decision.
“I’m disappointed with the committee,” Barushok said. “We got the number [of people] to seven, and then the last vote said five without explanation.”
DuCharme said the decision was based on SSFC’s concern about fiscal responsibility, since PAVE is a fairly new program.
Rep. Todd Garon diminished the argument of fiscal responsibility, as PAVE has already demonstrated their fiscal responsibility. He said restricting them on that ground doesn’t make sense.
By reducing the amount of people to attend the conference, Rep. Miona Short said SSFC belittled the roles of PAVE members and their importance in spreading their message to University of Wisconsin students.
“We are trivializing their roles,” Short said. “That doesn’t help the greater student body as much as it would if every role got to benefit from these conferences.”
A new amendment changing the number to six was made, allocating $3,450 to PAVE for the trip, ended in a tie. Committee Chair Thuy Pham broke the tie and passed the motion for six people.
SSFC followed this vote with a motion to approve PAVE’s $86,657.50 budget for the 2016-17 academic year. The motion was passed in a vote of 11-0 with two abstentions.
Working Class Student Union presentation
Lastly, Hong Trinh, Working Class Student Union member, presented a budget request for the organization to the committee.
Trinh requested an increase in the budget mainly due to an increase in employee salaries.
The budget was initially $29,522, but the request increased it to to $37,983.
SSFC will decide on Working Class Student Union’s budget at their next meeting Thursday night.
